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THE HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH 
CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




WMATT DT 0, 



WHAT D@ QT ? 



1861 




THE HISTORY 



OF THE 



Nineteenth Century 
In Caricature 



BY 

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE 

AND 

FREDERIC TABER COOPER 



PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1904 



^ 



B 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

APR 22^1904 

Copyright Entry 

Ct&A, . 1.% . / <\ ff k- 

CLASS a- XXc. No. 

K / M 

COPY B I 



K. 



Copyright 1903, 1904 
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 



Published April, 1904 









To 
HARRY THURSTON PECK 



/ 



CONTENTS 



PART I. THE NAPOLEONIC ERA 

I. The Beginning of Political Caricature . . i 
II. Hogarth and his Times 12 

III. James Gillray . . . . . . .19 

IV. Bonaparte as First Consul .... 28 
V. The Emperor at his Apogee . . . .35 

VI. Napoleon's Waning Power .... 44 

PART II. FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE 
CRIMEAN WAR 

VII. After the Downfall 57 

VIII. The " Poire " 65 

IX. The Baiting of Louis-Phillipe .... 73 

X. Mayeux and Robert Macaire .... 90 

XL From Cruikshank to Leech .... 97 

XII. The Beginning of Punch ..... 101 

XIII. Retrospective in 

XIV. '48 and the Coup d'Etat 119 

XV. The Struggle in the Crimea .... 128 

PART III. THE CIVIL AND FRANCO-PRUSSIAN 

WARS 

XVI. The Mexican War and Slavery . . .143 

XVII. Neglected Opportunities 159 

XVIII. The South Secedes 166 

XIX. The Four Years' Struggle . . . .175 

XX. Nations and Men in Caricature . . .188 

XXL The Outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War . 197 

XXII. The DebAcle 206 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

PART IV. THE END OF THE CENTURY 

XXIII. The Evolution of American Caricature 

XXIV. The Third French Republic 
XXV. General European Affairs 

XXVI. Thomas Nast 

XXVII. The American Political Campaigns of 1880 
and 1884 ..... 
XXVIII. The Influence of Journalism 
XXIX. Years of Turbulence 
XXX. American Parties and Platforms . 
XXXI. The Spanish-American War . 
XXXII. The Boer War and the Dreyfus Case 
XXXIII. The Men of To-day 



231 
236 
245 

2.55 

269 
278 
289 
309 
330 
342 
355 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



What It Is and What Is It? 

French Invasion of England 

Nelson at the Battle of the Nile (Gillray) 

Bonaparte after Landing (Gillray) 

John Bull Taking a Luncheon (Gillray) 

French Consular Triumvirate (Gillray) 

Capture of the Danish Ships (Gillray) 

The Broad-Bottom Administration (Gillray) 

Pacific Overtures (Gillray) 

The Great Coronation Procession (Gillray) 

Napoleon and Pitt (Gillray) 

Armed Heroes (Gillray) 

The Handwriting on the Wall (Gillray) 

The Double-Faced Napoleon (German cartoon) 

The Two Kings of Terror (Rowlandson) 

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (Gillray) 

Napoleon's Burden (German cartoon) 

The French Gingerbread Baker (Gillray) 

The Devil and Napoleon (French cartoon) 

The Consultation (French cartoon) 

The Corsican Top in Full Flight 

Napoleon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death (G 

The Spider's Web (Volk) . 

The Partition of the Map 

Napoleon's Plight (French cartoon) 

The Signature of Abdication (Cruikshank) 

The Allies' Oven (French cartoon) 

The New Robinson Crusoe (German cartoon 

Napoleon Caged (French cartoon) 

Restitution ..... 

Adjusting the Balance 

John Bull's New Batch of Ships (Charles) 

Russia as Mediator (Charles) 



llray) 



PAGE 

Frontispiece 
3 
5 
6 
8 
ii 

16 
19 

21 
23 
25 
27 
29 

3i 
33 
36 
38 
39 
4i 
45 
47 
48 
49 
50 
52 
54 
55 
56 
58 
60 
62 
63 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Cossack Hke (Charles) 

John Bull and the Alexandrians (Charles) 

John Bull's Troubles (Charles) 

The Order of the Extinguishers (French cartoon) 

Proudhon 

Digging the Grave 

Le Poire (Philipon) 

The Pious Monarch 

The Great Nut-Cracker 

Enfonce Lafayette (Daumier 

The Ship of State in Peril 

The Pit of Taxation (Grandville) 

The Question of Divorce (Daumier) 

The Resuscitation (Grandville) 

Louis Philippe as Bluebeard (Grandville) 

Barbarism and Cholera Invading 

The Raid . . 

Mayeux (Travies) 

Robert Macaire (Daumier) 

Extinguished ! 

Louis Philippe as Cain 

Laughing John — Crying John 

The Wellington Boot 

The Land of Liberty 

England's Admonition (Leech) 

The Napoleon of Peace 

The Sea-Serpent of 1848 

Europe in 1830 .... 

Honore Daumier (Benjamin) 

The Evolution of John Bull 

Joseph Prudhomme (Daumier) 

The Only Authorised Lamps (Vernier) 

Italian Cartoon of '48 

Napoleon le Petit (Vernier) 

The New Siamese Twins ■ . 

Louis Napoleon and Madame France 

The Proclamation (Gill) 

Split Crow in the Crimea 

Bursting of the Russian Bubble 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



General Fevrier Turned Traitor (Leech) 

Rochefort and His Lantern 

Brothers in Arms 

An American Cartoon on the Crimean War 

Theatrical Programme 

The British Lion's Vengeance (Tenniel) 

The French Porcupine (Leech) 

Bank-Oh's Ghost, 1837 • 

Balaam and Balaam's Ass 

New Map of the United States 

The Steeplechase for 1844 

Uncle Sam's Taylorifics 

The Mexican Commander 

Defense of the California Bank 

The Presidential Foot Race . 

Presidential Campaign of '56 

No Higher Law . 

The Fugitive Slave Law 

The Great Disunion Serpent 

Rough and Ready Locomotive Against the Field 

Sauce for Goose and Gander 

Peace (Nast) 

Virginia Pausing 

Civil War Envelopes 

Long Abe 

The Promissory Note 

The Great Tight Rope Feat 

At the Throttle .... 

The Expert Bartender 

The Southern Confederacy a Fact 

The Brighter Prospect 

"Why Don't you Take It?" 

The Old Bull Dog on the Right Track 

Little Mac in his Great Act 

The Grave of the Union 

The Abolition Catastrophe . 

The Blockade .... 

Miscegenation . . . . 

The Confederacy in Petticoats 



XI 

PAGE 
131 
133 
134 
136 

i38 
139 
141 
144 
144 

145 
147 
150 
151 
1.53 
153 
154 
155 
157 
158 
160 
162 
164 
166 
167 
168 
169 
170 
171 
172 
173 
i74 
175 
176 
178 
180 
181 
182 
183 
184 



Xll 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Uncle Sam': Menagerie 

Protecting Free Ballot 

The Nation at Lincoln's Bier (Tenniel) 

Figures from a Triumph 

The Diagnosis (Cham) 

The Egerean Nymph (Daumier) 

Paul and Virginia (Gill) 

The First Conscript of France (Gill) 

The Situation (Gill) 

Louis Blanc (Gill) 

Rival Arbiters (Tenniel) 

The Man Who Laughs (Gill) . 

The Man Who Thinks (Gill) . 

"To Be or Not to Be" (Gill) . 

Achilles in Retreat (Gill) 

The President of Rhodes (Daumier) 

A Tempest in a Glass of Water (Gill) 

A Duel to the Death (Tenniel) 

September 4th, 1870 

Her Baptism of Fire (Tenniel) 

Andre Gill .... 

The Marquis de Gallifet (Willette) 

The History of a Reign (Daumier) 

" This has Killed That " (Daumier) 

The Mousetrap and its Victims (Daumier) 

Prussia Annexes Alsace (Cham) 

Britannia's Sympathy (Cham) 

Adieu (Cham) .... 

Souvenirs and Regrets (Aranda) 

The Napoleon Mountebanks (Hadol) 

Prussia Introducing the New Assembly (Daumier) 

" Let us Eat the Prussian" (Gill) 

Design for a New Handbell (Daumier) 

Germany's Farewell 

Bismarck the First 

Trochu — 1870 .... 

Marshal Bazaine (Faustin) 

Rochefort .... 

The German Emperor Enters Paris (Regamey) 






LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Xlll 



Caran D'Ache 

Gulliver Crispi 

Changing the Map (Gill) 

Poor France! (Daumier) 

The Warning (Daumier) 

The New Year (Daumier) 

The Root of all Evil 

The Napoleonic Drama 

The French Political Situation (Regamey) 

New Crowns for Old 

Tightening the Grip 

Aeolus 

" L'Etat, C'est Moi " . 

The Hidden Hand 

The Irish Frankenstein 

The Daring Duckling . 

Settling the Alabama Claims 

Gordon Waiting at Khartoum 

The Gratz Brown Tag to Greeley's Coat (Nast) 

Thomas Nast 

Labour Cap and Dinner Pail (Nast) 

The Rag Baby (Nast) 

The Inflation Donkey (Nast) 

The Brains of Tammany (Nast) 

A Popular Verdict 

The Tattooed Columbia (Keppler) 

Splitting the Party 

The Headless Candidates 

On the Down Grade 

Forbidding the Banns (Keppler) 

The Wake (Keppler) 

A Common Sorrow 

Why They Dislike Him 

The First Tattooed Man (Gillam) 

A German Idea of Irish Home Rule 

The New National Sexton . 

Horatius Cleveland 

Bernard Gillam .... 

Joseph Keppler .... 



PAGE 

232 

233 
234 
237 
238 

239 
240 
241 
243 
245 
246 

247 
248 

249 
250 
251 
252 

253 
256 

257 
259 
260 
261 
262 
263 
264 
265 
266 
267 
270 
272 
273 
274 
275 
279 
280 
281 
282 
283 




XIV 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Th • John Bull Octopus 

The Hand of Anarchy 

The Tr.pl e Alliance 

A Present-Day Lesson 

Gordon in Khartoum 

The Spurious Parnell Letters 

Dropping the Pilot (Tenniel) 

L'Enfant Terrible . . . 

William Bluebeard 

Chinese Native Cartoon 

Japan in Corea .... 

Business at the Deathbed 

The Start for the China Cup 

End of the Chinese-Japanese War 

The Chinese Exclusion Act 

The Great Republican Circus (Opper) 

To the Rescue .... 

A Pilgrim's Progress 

General Boulanger 

The Hague Peace Conference 

A Fixture ..... 

Group of Modern French Caricaturists 

The Anglo-French War Barometer 

Rip Van Winkle Awakes 

They're Off .... 

Where am I at? (Gillam) 

The Political Columbus (Gillam) 

Cleveland's Map of the United States (Gillam) 

Return of the Southern Flags (Gillam) 

The Champion Masher (Gillam) 

The Harrison Platform (Keppler) 

The Chilian Affair 

A Political Tarn O'Shanter (Gillam) 

Don Quixote Bryan and the Windmill (Victor Gillam) 

Outing of the Anarchists 

To the Death .... 

The Great Weyler Ape 

We are the People 

Be Careful! It's Loaded (Victor Gillam) 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Safety Valve ..... 

The Latest War Bulletin (Hamilton) . 

Spanish Cartoons of the Spanish-American War 

The Spanish Brute (Hamilton) . 

Spanish Cartoons of the Spanish-American War 

The Rhodes Colossus (Sambourne) 

The Situation in South Africa (Gillam) 

Bloody Cartography 

Lady Macbeth 

The Flying Dutchman 

Oom Paul's Favorite Pastime 

Up against the Breastworks . 

The Napoleon of South Africa 

Fire! .... 

The Last Phase of the Dreyfus Cas 

Toward Freedom 

The French General's Staff . 

Between Scylla and Charybdis 

Devil's Island 

C. G. Bush 

Willie and His Papa (Opper) 

Homer Davenport 

Davenport's Conception of the Trusts 



I'AGE 

333 
334 
335 
337 
339 
342 
343 
344 
345 
346 
347 
348 
349 
350 
350 
351 
352 
353 
354 
356 
357 
359 
361 



HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH 
CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



PART I 

THE NAPOLEONIC ERA 

CHAPTER I 

THE BEGINNING OF POLITICAL CARICATURE 

WHILE the impulse to satirize public men in 
picture is probably as old as satiric verse, if not 
older, the political cartoon, as an effective agent 
in molding public opinion, is essentially a product of modern 
conditions and methods. As with the campaign song, its 
success depends upon its timeliness, upon the ability to seize 
upon a critical moment, a burning question of the hour, and 
anticipate the outcome while public excitement is still at a 
white heat. But unlike satiric verse, it is dependent upon ink 
and paper. It cannot be transmitted orally. The doggerel 
verses of the Roman legions passed from camp to camp with 
the mysterious swiftness of an epidemic, and found their way 
even into the sober history of Suetonius. The topical songs 
and parodies of the Middle Ages migrated from town to 
town with the strolling minstrels, as readily as did the cycles 
of heroic poetry. But with caricature the case was very 
different. It may be that the man of the Stone Age, whom 
Mr. Opper has lately utilized so cleverly in a series of carica- 



2 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

tures, was the first to draw rude and distorted likenesses of 
some unpopular chieftain, just as the Roman soldier of 79 
A. d. scratched on the wall of his barracks in Pompeii an 
unflattering portrait of some martinet centurion which the 
ashes of Vesuvius have preserved until to-day. It is certain 
that the Greeks and Romans appreciated the power of ridi- 
cule latent in satiric pictures; but until the era of the printing 
press, the caricaturist was as one crying in a wilderness. And 
it is only with the modern co-operation of printing and pho- 
tography that caricature has come into its full inheritance. 
The best and most telling cartoons are those which do not 
merely reflect current public opinion, but guide it. In look- 
ing back over a century of caricature, we are apt to overlook 
this distinction. A cartoon which cleverly illustrates some 
important historical event, and throws light upon the con- 
temporary attitude of the public, is equally interesting to-day, 
whether it anticipated the event or was published a month 
afterward. But in order to influence public opinion, carica- 
ture must contain a certain element of prophecy. It must 
suggest a danger or point an interrogation. As an example, 
we may compare two famous cartoons by the English artist 
Gillray, " A Connoisseur Examining a Cooper " and the 
" King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver." In the latter, George 
III., in the guise of a giant, is curiously examining through 
his magnifying glass a Lilliputian Napoleon. There is no 
element of prophecy about the cartoon. It simply reflects 
the contemptuous attitude of the time toward Napoleon, and 
underestimates the danger. The other cartoon, which ap- 
peared several years earlier, shows the King anxiously ex- 
amining the features of Cooper's well-known miniature of 
Cromwell, the great overthrower of kings. Public sentiment 
at that time suggested the imminence of another revolution, 



4 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

and the cartoon suggests a momentous question: "Will the 
fate of Charles I. be repeated? " In the light of history, the 
Gullivc- cartoon is to-day undoubtedly the more interesting, 
but at he time of its appearance it could not have produced 
•pulling approaching the sensation of that of " a Connois- 
seur." 

The necessity of getting a caricature swiftly before the pub- 
lic has always been felt, and has given rise to some curious 
devices and makeshifts. In the example which we have noted 
as having come down from Roman times, a patriotic citizen 
of Pompeii could find no better medium for giving his car- 
toon of an important local event to the world than by scratch- 
ing it upon the wall of his dwelling-house after the fashion of 
the modern advertisement. There was a time in the seven- 
teenth century when packs of political playing-cards enjoyed 
an extended vogue. The fashion of printing cartoons upon 
ladies' fans and other articles of similarly intimate character 
was a transitory fad in England a century ago. Mr. Acker- 
mann, a famous printer of his generation, and publisher of 
the greater part of Rowlandson's cartoons, adopted as an 
expedient for spreading political news a small balloon with an 
attached mechanism, which, when liberated, would drop news 
bulletins at intervals as it passed over field and village. In this 
country many people of the older generation will still remem- 
ber the widespread popularity of the patriotic caricature-en- 
velopes that were circulated during the Civil War. To-day 
we are so used to the daily newspaper cartoon that we do not 
stop to think how seriously handicapped the cartoonists of a 
century ago found themselves. The more important cartoons 
of Gillray and Rowlandson appeared either in monthly peri- 
odicals, such as the Westminster Magazine and the Oxford 
Magazine, or in separate sheets that sold at the prohibitive 



6 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

price of several shillings. In times of great public excite- 
ment, as during the later years of the Napoleonic wars, such 
cartoons were bought up greedily, the City vying with the 
aristocratic West End in their patriotic demand for them. 
But such times were exceptional, and the older caricaturists 
were obliged to let pass many interesting crises because the 
situations would have become already stale before the day 



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Buonaparte .flours, after Landuiu) 

of publication of the monthly magazines came round. With 
the advent of the illustrated weeklies the situation was iml 
proved, but it is only in recent times that the ideal condition! 
has been reached, when the cabled news of yesterday is! 
interpreted in the cartoon of to-day. 

There is another and less specific reason why caricature 
had to await the advent of printing and the wider dissem- 
ination of knowledge which resulted. The successful political 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 7 

cartoon presupposes a certain average degree of intelligence 
in a nation, an awakened civic conscience, a sense of responsi- 
bility for the nation's welfare. The cleverest cartoonist 
would waste his time appealing to a nation of feudal vassals; 
he could not expect to influence a people to whom the ballot 
box was closed. Caricature flourishes best in an atmosphere 
of democracy; there is an eternal incompatibility between its 
audacious irreverence and the doctrine of the divine right of 
kings. 

And yet the best type of caricature should not require a 
high degree of intelligence. Many clever cartoonists over- 
reach themselves by an excess of cleverness, appealing at best 
to a limited audience. Of this type are the cartoons whose 
point lies in parodying some famous painting or a masterpiece 
of literature, which, as a result, necessarily remains caviare to 
the general. There is a type of portrait caricature so cul- 
tured and subtle that it often produces likenesses truer to the 
man we know in real life than a photograph would be. A 
good example of this type is the familiar work of William 
Nicholson, whose portrait of the late Queen of England is 
said to have been recognized by her as one of the most char- 
acteristic pictures she had ever had taken. What appeals to 
the public, however, is a coarser type, a gross exaggeration of 
prominent features, a willful distortion, resulting in ridicule 
or glorification. Oftentimes the caricature degenerates into 
a mere symbol. We have outgrown the puerility of the 
pictorial pun which flourished in England at the close of the 
\ seventeenth century, when cartoonists of Gillray's rank were 
content to represent Lord Bute as a pair of boots, Lord North 
as Boreas, the north wind, and the elder Fox with the head 
and tail of the animal suggested by his name. Yet personi- 
fication of one kind and another, and notably the personifica- 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 9 

tion of the nations in the shape of John Bull and Uncle Sam 
and the Russian Bear, forms the very alphabet of political 
caricature of the present day. Some of the most memo- 
rable series that have ever appeared were founded upon a 
chance resemblance of the subject of them to some natural 
object. Notable instances are Daumier's famous series 
of Louis Philippe represented as a pear, and Nast's 
equally clever, but more local, caricatures of Tweed 
as a money-bag. It would be interesting, if the material 
were accessible, to trace the development of the different 
personifications of England, France, and Russia, and the 
rest, from their first appearance in caricature, but unfortu- 
nately their earlier development cannot be fully traced. 
The underlying idea of representing the different nations as 
individuals, and depicting the great international crises in a 
series of allegories or parables or animal stories — a sort of 
pictorial ^Esop's fables — dates back to the very beginning 
of caricature. In one of the earliest cartoons that have been 
preserved, England, France, and a number of minor princi- 
palities which have since disappeared from the map of 
Europe, are represented as playing a game of cards with 
some disputed island possessions as the stakes. In this case 
the several nations are indicated merely by heraldic emblems. 
The conception of John Bull was not to be evolved until a 
couple of centuries later. This cartoon, like the others of 
that time, originated in France under Louis XII. The fur- 
ther development of the art was decisively checked under the 
despotic reign of Louis XIV., and the few caricaturists of that 
time who had the courage to use their pencil against the king 
were driven to the expedient of publishing their works in 
Holland. 

An impressive illustration of the advantage which the 









io CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



satirical poet has over the cartoonist lies in the fact that 
some of the cleverest political satire ever written, as well as 
the best examples of the application of the animal fable to 
politics, were produced in France at this very time in the 
fables of La Fontaine. 




th, ahwjr, thu Iriinup'J «f CAMEACJilU-o UBBV.V -. air SEEP SKIKKS ."-^' Ui/av.MVUIT* • *M» (rffll/W i»«- /#j> - l,i?jtJ^h,^.i"KJ- 

miff iuPoJ, ah M» Consb'tutiemai-PupunlEbtei! of If* MjcSajn -mlLlktc* Grounl 



BY GILLRAY. 



CHAPTER II 

HOGARTH AND HIS TIMES 






FROM Holland caricature migrated to Great 
Britain in the closing years of the seventeenth cen- 
tury — a natural result of the attention which 
Dutch cartoonists had bestowed upon the revolution of 1688 
— and there it found a fertile and congenial soil. The 
English had not had time to forget that they had once put 
the divine right of kings to the test of the executioner's block, 
and what little reverence still survived was not likely to afford 
protection for a race of imported monarchs. Moreover, as it 
happened, the development of English caricature was des- 
tined to be guided by the giant genius of two men, Hogarth 
and Gillray; and however far apart these two men were in 
their moral and artistic standards, they had one thing in 
common, a perennial scorn for the House of Hanover. 
Hogarth's contemptuous satire of George II. was more than 
echoed in Gillray's merciless attacks upon George III. The 
well-known cartoons of " Farmer George," and " George the 
Button-Maker," were but two of the countless ways in which 
he avenged himself upon the dull-witted king who had once 
acknowledged that he could not see the point of Gillray's 
caricatures. 

Although Hogarth antedates the period covered by the 
present articles by fully half a century, he is much too com- 
manding a figure in the history of comic art to be summarily 
dismissed. The year 1720 marks the era of the so-called 
" bubble mania," the era of unprecedented inflation, of the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 13 

South Sea Company in London, and the equally notorious 
Mississippi schemes of John Law in France. Popular excite- 
ment found vent in a veritable deluge of cartoons, many of 
which originated in Amsterdam and were reprinted in Lon- 
don, often with the addition of explanatory satiric verses in 
English. In one, Fortune is represented riding in a car driven 
by Folly, and drawn by personifications of the different com- 
panies responsible for the disastrous epidemic of speculation : 
the Mississippi, limping along on a wooden leg; the South 
Sea, with its foot in splints, etc. In another, we have an 
imaginary map of the Southern seas, representing " the very 
famous island of Madhead, situated in Share Sea, and 
inhabited by all kinds of people, to which is given the general 
name of Shareholders." John Law came in for a major 
share of the caricaturist's attention. In one picture he is 
represented as assisting Atlas to bear up immense globes of 
wind; in another, he is a "wind-monopolist," declaring, 
" The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation. Master 
of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly 
becomes straightway the object of idolatry." The windy 
character of the share-business is the dominant note in the 
cartoons of the period. Bubbles, windmills, flying kites, 
play a prominent part in the detail with which the background 
of the typical Dutch caricature was always crowded. These 
cartoons, displayed conspicuously in London shop windows, 
were not only seen by ITogarth, but influenced him vitally. 
His earliest known essay in political caricature is an adapta- 
tion of one of these Dutch prints, representing the wheel 
of Fortune, bearing the luckless and infatuated speculators 
high aloft. His latest work still shows the influence of 
Holland in the endless wealth of minute detail, the painstak- 
ing elaboration of his backgrounds, in which the most patient 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 15 

examination is ever finding something new. With Hogarth, 
the overcharged method of the Dutch school became a 
medium for irrepressible genius. At the hands of his fol- 
lowers and imitators, it became a source of obscurity and 
confusion. 

While Hogarth is rightly recognized as the father of 
English caricature, it must be remembered that his best work 
was done on the social rather than on the political side. Even 
his most famous political series, that of " The Elections," is 
broadly generalized. It is not in any sense campaign litera- 
ture, but an exposition of contemporary manners. And this 
was always Hogarth's aim. He was by instinct a realist, en- 
dowed with a keen sense of humor — a quality in which many a 
modern realist is deficient. He satirized life as he saw it, the 
good and the bad together, with a frankness which at times 
was somewhat brutal, like the frankness of Fielding and of 
Smollett — the frankness of the age they lived in. It was 
essentially an outspoken age, robust and rather gross ; a red- 
blooded age, nurtured on English beef and beer; a jovial 
age that shook its sides over many a broad jest, and saw no 
shame in open allusion to the obvious and elemental facts of 
physical life. Judged by the standards of his day, there is 
little offense in Hogarth's work; even when measured by 
our own, he is not deliberately licentious. On the contrary, 
he set an example of moderation which his successors would 
have done well to imitate. Tie realized, as the later carica- 
turists of his century did not, that the great strength of pic- 
torial satire lies in ridicule rather than in invective; that the 
ubtlest irony often lies in a close adherence to truth, where 
riotous and unrestrained exaggeration defeats its own end. 
Just as in the case of " Joseph Andrews," Fielding's creative 
instinct got the upper hand of the parodist, so in much of 




Q ^ 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 17 

Hogarth's work one feels that the caricaturist is forced to 
yield place to the realistic artist, the student of human life, 
carried away by the interest of the story he has to tell. His 
chief gift to caricature is his unprecedented development of 
the narrative quality in pictorial art. He pointed a road 
along which his imitators could follow him only at a distance. 

With the second half of the eighteenth century there began 
an era of great license in the political press, an era of bitter 
vituperation and vile personal abuse. Hogarth was one of 
the chief sufferers. After holding aloof from partisan poli- 
tics for nearly half a century, he published, in 1762, his 
well-known cartoon attacking the ex-minister, Pitt. All 
Europe is represented in flames, which are spreading to 
Great Britain in spite of the efforts of Lord Bute, aided by his 
Highlanders, to extinguish them. Pitt is blowing upon the 
flames, which are being fed by the Duke of Newcastle from 
a barrow full of Monitors and North Britons, two scurrilous 
papers of the day. The bitterness with which Hogarth was 
attacked in retaliation and the persistence of his persecutors 
resulted, as was generally believed at the time, in a broken 
heart and his death in 1764. 

An amazing increase in the number of caricatures followed 
the entry of Lord Bute's ministry into power. They were 
distinguished chiefly by their poor execution and gross inde- 
cency. As early as 1762, the Gentleman's Magazine, itself 
none too immaculate, complains that " Many of the repre- 
sentations that have lately appeared in the shops are not only 
Reproachful to the government, but offensive to common- 
sense; they discover a tendency to inflame, without a spark 
of fire to light their own combustion." The state of society 
in England was at this time notoriously immoral and licen- 
tious. It was a period of hard living and hard drinking. 



i8 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

The well-known habits of such public figures as Sheridan and 
Fox are eminent examples. The spirit of gambling had 
become a mania, and women had caught the contagion as well 
as men. Nowhere was the profligacy of the times more 
clearly shown than in the looseness of public social functions, 
such as the notorious masquerade balls, which a contemporary 
journal, the Westminster Magazine, seriously decried as 
" subversive of virtue and every noble and domestic point of 
honor." The low standards of morals and want of delicacy 
are revealed in the extravagance of women's dress, the loose- 
ness of their speech. It was an age when women of rank, such 
as Lady Buckingham and Lady Archer, were publicly threat- 
ened by an eminent judge with exposure on the pillory for 
having systematically enticed young men and robbed them at j 
their faro tables, and afterward found themselves exposed in 
the pillory of popular opinion in scurrilous cartoons from 
shop windows all over London. 



CHAPTER III 

JAMES GILLRAY 

i T a time when cheap abuse took the place of 
/ ^ technical skill, and vulgarity passed for wit, a 
/ % man of unlimited audacity, who was also a con- 
summate master of his pencil, easily took precedence. Such 
a man was James Gillray, unquestionably the leading cartoon- 
ist of the reign of George III. Yet of the many who are| 
to-day familiar with the name of Gillray and the important 
part he played in influencing public opinion during the 1 
struggle with Napoleon, very few have an understanding of 
the dominant qualities of his work. A large part of it, and 
probably the most representative part, is characterized by a 
foulness and an obscenity which the present generation cannot 
countenance. There is a whole series of cartoons bearing his 
name which it would not only be absolutely out of the ques- 
tion to reproduce, but the very nature of which can be indi- 
cated only in the most guarded manner. Imagine the works 
of Rabelais shamelessly illustrated by a master hand! Try! 
to conceive of the nature of the pictures which Panurge 
chalked up on the walls of old Paris. It was not merely the 
fault of the times, as in the case of Hogarth. Public taste was 
sufficiently depraved already; but Gillray deliberately prosti-' 
tuted his genius to the level of a procurer, to debauch it 
further. From first to last his drawings impress one as 
emanating from a mind not only unclean, but unbalanced as; 
well — a mind over which there hung, even at the beginning, 
the furtive shadow of that madness which at last overtook 



22 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

and blighted him. There is but one of the hallmarks of great 
caricature in the work of Gillray, and that is the lasting 
impression which they make. They refuse to be forgotten; 
they remain imprinted on the brain, like the obsession of a 
nightmare. While in one sense they stand as a pitiless 
indictment of the generation that tolerated them, they are not 
a reflection of the life that Gillray saw, except in the sense 
that their physical deformity symbolizes the moral foulness 
of the age. Grace and charm and physical beauty, which 
Hogarth could use effectively, are unknown quantities to 
Gillray. There is an element of monstrosity about all his 
figures, distorted and repellent. Foul, bloated faces; twisted, 
swollen limbs; unshapely figures whose protuberant flesh; 
suggests a tumefied and fungoid growth — such is the brood] 
begotten by Gillray's pencil, like the malignant spawn of some 
forgotten circle of the lower inferno. 

It would be idle to dispute the far-reaching power of 
Gillray's genius, perverted though it was. Throughout the; 
Napoleonic wars, caricature and the name of Gillray are con- 
vertible terms; for, even after he was forced to lay down his 
pencil, his brilliant contemporaries and successors, Rowland- 
son and Cruikshank, found themselves unable to throw of] 
the fetters of his influence. No history of Napoleon is quit(j 
complete which fails to recognize Gillray as a potent factor iij 
crystallizing public opinion in England. His long series o 
cartoons aimed at " little Boney " are the culminating worl 
of his life. Their power lay, not in intellectual subtlety o 
brilliant scintillation of wit, but in the bitterness of theij 
invective, the appeal they make to elemental passions. The J 
spoke a language which the roughest of London mobs couh 
understand — the language of the gutter. They were, man 
of them, masterpieces of pictorial Billingsgate. 



1 



24 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

There is rancor, there is venom, there is the inevitable 
inheritance of the warfare of centuries, in these caricatures of 
Gillray, but above all there is fear — fear of Napoleon, of his 
genius, of his star. It has been very easy for Englishmen of 
later days to say that the French never could have crossed 
the Channel, that there was never any reason for disquiet; 
it was another matter in the days when troops were actually 
massing by thousands on the hills behind Boulogne. You 
can find this fear voiced everywhere in Gillray, in the discord- 
ance between the drawings and the text. John Bull is the ox, 
Bonaparte the contemptible frog; but it is usually the ox who 
is bellowing out defiance, daring the other to " come on," 
flinging down insult at the diminutive foe. " Let 'em come, 
damme! " shouts the bold Briton in the pictures of the time. 
" Damme! where are the French bugaboos? Single-handed 
I'll beat forty of 'em, damme ! " Every means was used to 
rouse the spirit of the English nation, and to stimulate hatred 
of the French and their leader. In one picture, Boney and 
his family are in rags, and are gnawing raw bones in a rude 
Corsican hut; in another we find him with a hookah and tur- 
ban, having adopted the Mahometan religion; in a third 
we see him murdering the sick at Joppa. In the caricatures 
of Gillray, Napoleon is always a monster, a fiend in human 
shape, craven and murderous; but when dealing with the 
question of this fiend's power for evil, Gillray made no 
attempt at consistency. This ogre, who through one series 
of pictures was represented as kicked about from boot to 
boot, kicked by the Spaniards, the Turks, the Austrians, the 
Prussians, the Russians, in another is depicted as being very 
dangerous indeed. A curious example of this inconsistency 
will be found in placing side by side the two cartoons consid- 
ered by many to be Gillray's best: " The King of Brobding- 




en 
W 
° J\ 

o $ 



26 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



nag and Gulliver," already referred to, and " Tiddy-Doll, 
the great French gingerbread Maker, Drawing out a new 
Batch of Kings." The " pernicious, little, odious reptile " 
whom George the Third is holding so contemptuously in the 
hollow of his hand, in the first caricature, is in the second 
concededly of European importance. 



CHAPTER IV 

BONAPARTE AS FIRST CONSUL 

FOR the first decade of the nineteenth century there 
was but one important source of caricature, and 
one all-important subject — England and Bona- 
parte. America at this time counted for little in international 
politics. The revolutionary period closed definitely with the 
death of Washington, the one figure in our national politics 
who stood for something definite in the eyes of Europe. Our 
incipient naval war with France, which for a moment threat- 
ened to assign us a part in the general struggle of the Powers, 
was amicably concluded before the close of the eighteenth 
century. Throughout the Jeffersonian period, national and 
local satire and burlesque flourished, atoning in quantity for 
what it lacked in wit and artistic skill. Mr. Parton, in his 
" Caricature and Other Comic Art," finds but one cartoon 
which he thinks it worth while to cite — Jefferson kneeling be- 
fore a pillar labeled " Altar of Gallic Despotism," upon 
which are Paine's " Age of Reason," and the works of Rous- 
seau, Voltaire, and Helvetius, with the demon of the French 
Revolution crouching behind it, and the American Eagle 
soaring to the sky bearing away the Constitution and the in- 
dependence of the United States, and he adds : " Pictures of 
that nature, of great size, crowded with objects, emblems, and 
sentences — an elaborate blending of burlesque, allegory, and 
enigma — were so much valued by that generation that some 
of them were engraved upon copper." 

France, on the contrary, the central stage of the great 

28 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



29 



drama of nations, might at this time have produced a school 
of caricaturists worthy of their opportunity — a school that 
would have offset with its Gallic wit the heavier school of 
British invective, and might have furnished Napoleon with 
a strong weapon against his most persistent enemies, had he 
not, with questionable wisdom, sternly repressed pictorial 
satire of a political nature. As the century opens, the drama 




" THE DOUBLE-FACED NAPOLEON. 
Frotn the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr. 

of the ensuing fourteen years becomes clearly denned; the 
prologue has been played; Napoleon's ambition in the East 
has-been checked, first by the Battle of the Nile, and then 
definitely at Aboukir. Henceforth he is to limit his schemes 
of conquest to Europe, and John Bull is the only national 
figure who seems likely to attempt to check him. The Battle 
of the Nile was commemorated by Gillray, who depicted 



30 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

Nelson's victory in a cartoon entitled " Extirpation of the 
Plagues of Egypt, Destruction of the Revolutionary Croco- 
diles, or the British Hero Cleansing the Mouth of the Nile." 
Here Nelson is shown dispersing the French fleet treated as 
crocodiles. He has destroyed numbers with his cudgel of 
British oak; he is beating down others; a whole bevy, with 
hooks through their noses, are attached by strings to the iron 
hook which replaced his lost forearm. In the distance a 
crocodile is bursting and casting fire and ruin on all sides. 
This is an allusion to the destruction of the Orient, the flag- 
ship of the Republican Admiral, the heroic Brueys, who de- 
clined to quit his post when literally cut to pieces. 

Another cartoon by Gillray which belongs to this period 
is " The French Consular Triumvirate Settling the New 
Constitution." It introduces the figures of Napoleon and 
his fellow-consuls, Cambaceres and Lebrun, who replaced the 
very authors of the new instrument, Sieyes and Ducos, quietly 
deposed by Napoleon within the year. The second and third 
consuls are provided with blank sheets of paper, for mere 
form — they have only to bite their pens. The Corsican is 
compiling a constitution in accordance with his own views. 
A band of imps is beneath the table, forging new chains for 
France and for Europe. 

In England, the Addington ministry, which in 1801 re- 
placed that of William Pitt, and are represented in caricature 
as " Lilliputian substitutes " lost in the depths of Mr. Pitt's 
jack-boots, set out as a peace ministry and entered into the 
negotiations with Napoleon which, in the following March, 
resulted in the Peace of Amiens. Gillray anticipated this 
peace with several alarmist cartoons: "Preliminaries of 
Peace," representing John Bull being led by the nose across 
the channel over a rotten plank, while Britannia's shield and 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



3i 



several valuable possessions have been cast aside into the 
water; and " Britannia's Death Warrant," in which Britannia 
is seen being dragged away to the guillotine by the Corsican 
marauder. The peace at first gave genuine satisfaction in 
England, but toward the end of 1802 there were growing 
signs of popular discontent, which Gillray voiced in " The 
Nursery, with Britannia Reposing in Peace." Britannia is 
here portrayed as an overgrown baby in her cradle and fed 
upon French principles by Addington, Lord Hawkesbury, and 
Fox. Still more famous was his next cartoon, " The First 




THE TWO KINGS OF TERROR. 
After a cartoon by Rowland son. 



Kiss this Ten Years ; or, the Meeting of Britannia and Citizen 
Francois." Britannia, grown enormously stout, her shield 
and spear idly reposing against the wall, is blushing deeply 
at his warm embrace and ardent expressions of joy: 
" Madame, permit me to pay my profound esteem to your 
engaging person, and to seal on your divine lips my everlast- 
ing attachment! ! !" She replies: "Monsieur, you are 
truly a well-bred gentleman ; and though you make me blush, 



32 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

yet you kiss so delicately that I cannot refuse you, though I 
was sure you would deceive me again." In the background 
the portraits of King George and Bonaparte scowl fiercely at 
each other upon the wall. This is said to be one of the very 
few caricatures which Napoleon himself heartily enjoyed. 

From now on, the cartoons take on a more caustic tone. 
Britannia is being robbed of her cherished possessions, even 
Malta being on the point of being wrested from her; while 
the bugaboo of an invading army looms large upon the 
horizon. In one picture Britannia, unexpectedly attacked 
by Napoleon's fleet, is awakening from a trance of fancied 
peace, and praying that her " angels and ministers of disgrace 
defend her! " In another, John Bull, having waded across 
the water, is taunting little Boney, whose head just shows 
above the wall of his fortress : 

If you mean to invade us, why make such a rout ? 
I say, little Boney, why don't you come out ? 
Yes, d you, why don't you come out ? 

In his cartoon called " Promised Horrors of the French 
Invasion ; or, Forcible Reasons for Negotiating a Regicide 
Peace," Gillray painted the imaginary landing of the French 
in England. The ferocious legions are pouring from St. 
James's Palace, which is in flames, and they are marching past 
the clubs. The practice of patronizing democracy in the 
countries they had conquered has been carried out by handing 
over the Tories, the constitution, and the crown to the Foxite 
reformers and the Whig party. The chief hostility of the 
French troops is directed against the aristocratic clubs. An 
indiscriminate massacre of the members of White's is pro- 
ceeding in the doorways, on the balconies, and wherever the 
republican levies have penetrated. The royal princes are 
stabbed and thrown into the street. A rivulet of blood is 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



33 




" You may have seen Gillray's famous print of him — 
in the old wig, in the stout, old, hideous Windsor uni- 
form — as the King of Brobdingnag, peering at a little 
Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in the 
other he has an opera-glass, through which he sur- 
veys the pygmy ? Our fathers chose to set up George 
as the type of a great king ; and the little Gulliver was 
the great Napoleon." — Thackeray's " Four Georges." 



34 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

running. In the center of the picture is a tree of liberty. 
To this tree Pitt is bound, while Fox is lashing him. 

The increasing venom of the English cartoons, and their 
frequent coarse personalities, caused no little uneasiness to 
Bonaparte, until they culminated in a famous cartoon by 
Gillray, " The Handwriting on the Wall," a broad satire on 
Belshazzar's feast, which was published August 24, 1803. 
The First Consul, his wife Josephine, and the members of the 
court are seated at table, consuming the good things of Old 
England. The palace of St. James, transfixed upon Napo- 
leon's fork; the tower of London, which one of the convives 
is swallowing whole; the head of King George on a platter 
inscribed: " Oh, de beef of Old England! " A hand above; 
holds out the scales of Justice, in which the legitimate crown 
of France weighs down the red cap with its attached chain — 1 
despotism misnamed liberty. 



CHAPTER V 

THE EMPEROR AT HIS APOGEE 

FOR the next year parliamentary strife at home, 
fostered by Pitt's quarrel with the Addington 
ministry on the one hand and his opposition to Fox 
on the other, kept the cartoonists busy. They found time, 
however, to celebrate the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor 
in December, 1804. Gillray anticipated the event with a 
cartoon entitled " The Genius of France Nursing her Dar- 
ling," in which the genius, depicted as a lady with blood- 
stained garments and a reeking spear, tosses an infant Na- 
poleon, armed with a scepter, and vainly tries to check his 
cries with a rattle surmounted by a crown. 

Rowlandson, Gillray's clever and more artistic con- 
temporary, commemorated the event itself in a clever cartoon, 
" The Death of Madame Rdpublique," published December 
14, 1804. The moribund Republique lies stretched upon 
her death-bed, her nightcap adorned with the tricolored 
cockade. The Abbe Sieyes, in the role of doctor, is exhibit- 
ing the Emperor, portrayed as a newborn infant in long 
clothes. John Bull, spectacles on nose, is regarding the 
altered conditions with visible astonishment. " Pray, Mr. 
Abbe Sieyes, what was the cause of the poor lady's death? 
lie seemed at one time in a tolerable thriving way." " She 
ied in childbed, Mr. Bull, after giving birth to this little 
Emperor! " 

This was followed on the 1st of January by a large satirical 
print by Gillray, of " The Grand Coronation Procession," 

35 



36 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



in which the feature that gave special offense was the group 
of three princesses, the Princess Borghese,the Princess Louise, 
and the Princess Joseph Bonaparte, arrayed in garments of 
indecent scantiness, and heading the procession as the " three 
imperial Graces." The English caricatures of this period 
relating to the new Emperor and Empress are as a rule not 




FROM A GERMAN CARTOON OF THE PERIOD. 



only libelous, but grossly coarse. At the same time, the 
political conditions of the times are cleverly hit off in " The 
Plum Pudding in Danger; or, State Epicures Taking un 
Petit Souper," published February 26, 1805, which depicts 
the rival pretensions of Napoleon and Pitt. They are seated 
at opposite sides of the table, the only dish between them 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 37 

being the Globe, served up on a shallow plate and resembling 
a plum pudding. Napoleon's sword has sliced off the con- 
tinent — France, Holland, Spain, Italy, Prussia — and his fork 
is dug spitefully into Hanover, which was then an appanage 
of the British crown. Pitt's trident is stuck in the ocean, and 
his carver is modestly dividing the Globe down the middle. 

During the summer of 1805 the third coalition against 
France was completed, its chief factors being Great Britain, 
Russia, and Austria. A contemporary print entitled " Tom 
Thumb at Bay " commemorates the new armament. Napo- 
leon, dropping crown and scepter in his flight, is evading the 
Austrian eagle, the Russian bear, and the Westphalian pig, 
only to run at last pell-mell into the gaping jaws of the British 
lion. It is somewhat curious that the momentous events of 
the new war — the annihilation of the French fleet at Trafal- 
gar, the equally decisive French victory at Austerlitz — were 
scarcely noticed in caricature, and a few exceptions have 
little merit. But in the following January, 1806, when 
Napoleon had entered upon an epoch of king-making, with 
his kings of Wurtemburg and Bavaria, Gillray produced one 
of his most famous prints. It was published the 23d of 
January (the day that Pitt breathed his last), and was en- 
titled " Tiddy-Doll, the Great French Gingerbread Baker, 
Drawing out a new Batch of Kings, His Man, ' Hopping 
Talley,' Mixing up the Dough." The great gilt ginger- 
bread baker is shown at work at his new French oven for 
imperial gingerbread. He is just drawing from the oven's 
mouth a fresh batch of kings. The fuel is shown in the form 
of cannon-balls. Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, 
Venice and Spain are following the fate of the French Re- 
public. On top of the chest of drawers, labeled respectively 
" kings and queens," " crowns and scepters,' 






38 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



moons " is arranged a gay parcel of little dough viceroys 
intended for the next batch. Among them are the figures of 
Fox, Sheridan, Derby, and others of the Whig party in 
England. 

In the comprehensive and ill-assorted Coalition ministry 
which was formed soon after Pitt's death, the caricaturists 
found a congenial topic for their pencils. They ridiculed it 




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unmercifully under the title " All the Talents," and the 
" Board Bottomed " ministry. A composite picture by Row- 
landson shows the ministry as a spectacled ape in the wig of a 
learned justice, with episcopal mitre and Catholic crozier. 
He wears a lawyer's coat and ragged breeches, with a shoe on 
one foot and a French jack-boot on the other. He is dancing 
on a funeral pyre of papers, the results of the administration, 
its endless negotiations with France, its sinecures and patron- 
ages, which are blazing away. The creature's foot is dis- 
charging a gun, which produces signal mischief in the rear 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



39 



and brings down two heavy folios, the Magna Charta and 
the Coronation Oath, upon its head. 

This ministry's futile negotiations for peace with France 
are frequently burlesqued. Gillray published on April 5 
" Pacific Overtures; or, a Flight from St. Cloud's ' over the 
water to Charley,' " in which the negotiations are described 
as " a new dramatic peace, now rehearsing." In this cartoon 
King George has left the state box — where the play-book of 
" I Know You All " still remains open — to approach nearer 




" THE DEVIL AND NAPOLEON." 
From an anonymous French caricature. 

to little Boney, who, elevated on the clouds, is directing atten- 
tion to his proposed treaty. "Terms of Peace: Acknowl- 
edge me as Emperor; dismantle your fleet, reduce your 
armies; abandon Malta and Gibraltar; renounce all con- 
tinental connection; your colonies I will take at a valuation; 
engage to pay to the Great Nation for seven years annually 
one million pounds; and place in my hands as hostages the 
Princess Charlotte of Wales, with others of the late adminis- 



40 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

tration whom I shall name." King George replies: " Very 
amusing terms, indeed, and might do vastly well with some 
of the new-made little gingerbread kings; but we are not in 
the habit of giving up either ships or commerce or colonies 
merely because little Boney is in a pet to have them." This 
cartoon introduces among others Talleyrand, O'Conor, Fox, 
Lord Ellenborough, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Moira, 
Lord Lauderdale, Addington, Lord Henry Petty, Lord 
Derby, and Mrs. Fitzherbert. 

Shortly afterward, on July 21, 1806, Rowlandson voices 
the current feeling of distrust of Fox in " Experiments at 
Dover; or, Master Charley's Magic Lantern." Fox is 
depicted at Dover, training the rays of his magic lantern on 
the cliffs of Calais. John Bull, watching him, is not satis- 
fied. " Yes, yes, it be all very fine, if it be true; but I can't 
forget that d — d Omnium last week. . . I will tell thee what, 
Charley, since thee hast become a great man, I think in my 
heart thee beest always conjuring." 

The cartoon entitled " Westminster Conscripts under the 
Training Act" appeared September 1, 1806. Napoleon, 
the drill sergeant, is elevated on a pile of cannon-balls; he is 
giving his authoritative order to " Ground arms." The 
invalided Fox has been wheeled to the ground in his arm- 
chair; the Prince of Wales' plume appears on the back of his 
seat. Other figures in the cartoon are Lord Lauderdale, 
Lord Grenville, Lord Howick, Lord Holland, Lord Robert 
Spencer, Lord Ellenborough, the Duke of Clarence, Lord 
Moira, Lord Chancellor Erskine, Colonel Hanger, and 
Talleyrand. 

Gillray has left a cartoon commemorating the arrival of 
the Danish squadron, under the title of " British Tars Tow- 
ing the Danish Fleet into Harbor; the Broad Bottom 




#/ Co/?*f////</?'/<>7l- 



Iapoleon : " Dear cousfn, how do you find my condition ? " 

ardinal Fksch : "Sire, it cannot last. Your Majesty has too bad a constitution." 

From the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 43 

Leviathan trying to swamp Billy's Old Boat; and the Little 
Corsican Tottering on the Clouds of Ambition." This car- 
toon was issued October i, 1807. Lords Liverpool and 
Castlereagh are lustily rowing the Billy Pitt; Canning, 
seated in the stern, is towing the captured fleet into Sheerness, 
with the Union Jack flying over the forts. Copenhagen, 
smoking from the recent bombardment, may be distinguished 
in the distance. In Sheerness harbor the sign of'" Good Old 
George " is hung out at John Bull's Tavern; John Bull is 
seated at the door, a pot of porter in his hand, waving his 
hat and shouting: "Rule Britannia! Britannia Rules the 
Waves ! " That the expedition did not escape censure is 
shown by the figure of a three-headed porpoise which is 
savagely assailing the successful crew. This monster bears 
the heads of Lord Howick, shouting " Detraction! " Lord 
St. Vincent filled with " Envy," and discharging a watery- 
broadside; and Lord Grenville, who is raising his " Opposi- 
tion Clamor " to confuse their course. 



CHAPTER VI 
napoleon's waning power 

NO period of the Napoleonic wars gave better op- 
portunity for satire than Napoleon's disastrous 
occupation of Spain and his invasion of Portugal. 
The titles alone of the cartoons would fill a volume. The 
sanguine hopes of success cherished by the English govern- 
ment are expressed by Gillray in a print published April 10, 
1808. " Delicious Dreams! Castles in the Air! Glorious 
Prospects ! " It depicts the ministers sunken in a drunken 
sleep and visited by glorious visions of Britannia and her lion 
occupying a triumphal car formed from the hull of a British 
ship, drawn by an Irish bull and led by an English tar. She 
is dragging captive to the Tower little Boney and the Russian 
Bear, both loaded with chains. 

The dangers which threatened Napoleon at this period 
were shown by Gillray in one of the most striking of all his car- 
toons, the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," which was issued 
September 24, 1808. The valley is the valley of Bunyan's 
allegory. The Emperor is proceeding timorously down a 
treacherous path, bounded on either side by the waters of 
Styx and hemmed in by a circle of flame. From every side 
horrors are springing up to assail him. The British lion, 
raging and furious, is springing at his throat. The Portu- 
guese wolf has broken his chain. King Death, mounted on a 
mule of " True Royal Spanish Breed," has cleared at a bound 
the body of the ex-King Joseph, which has been thrown into 
the " Ditch of Styx." Death is poising his spear with fatal 

44 




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46 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

aim, warningly holding up at the same time his hour-glass 
with the sand exhausted; flames follow in his course. From 
the smoke rise the figures of Junot and Dupont, the beaten 
generals. The papal tiara is descending as a " Roman 
meteor," charged with lightnings to blast the Corsican. The 
" Turkish New Moon " is seen rising in blood. The " Spirit 
of Charles XII." rises from the flames to avenge the wrongs 
of Sweden. The " Imperial German Eagle " is emerging 
from a cloud; the Prussian bird appears as a scarecrow, mak- 
ing desperate efforts to fly and screaming revenge. From the 
" Lethean Ditch " the " American Rattlesnake " is thrusting 
forth a poisoned tongue. The " Dutch Frogs " are spitting 
out their spite; and the Rhenish Confederation is personified 
as a herd of starved " Rats," ready to feast on the Corsican. 
The great " Russian Bear," the only ally Napoleon has 
secured, is shaking his chain and growling — a formidable 
enemy in the rear. 

Gillray's caricature entitled " John Bull Taking a 
Luncheon; or, British Cooks Cramming Old Grumble-Giz- 
zard with Bonne Chere," shows the strange-appearing John 
of the caricature of that day sitting at a table, overwhelmed 
by the zealous attentions of his cooks, foremost among whom 
is the hero of the Nile, who is offering him a " Fricassee a la 
Nelson," a large dish of battered French ships of the line. 
John is swallowing a frigate at a mouthful. Through the 
window we see Fox and Sheridan, representative of the 
Broad Bottom administration, running away in dismay at 
John Bull's voracity. 

As Gillray retires from the field several other clever artists 
stand ready to take his place, and chief among them Rowland- 
son. The latter had a distinct advantage over Gillray in his 
superior artistic training. He was educated in the French 




x a 



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s 



4 8 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



schools, where he gave especial attention to studies from the 
nude. In the opinion of such capable judges as Reynolds, 
West, and Lawrence, his gifts might have won him a high 
place among English artists, if he had not turned, through 
sheer perversity, to satire and burlesque. Rowlandson's 
Napoleonic cartoons began in July, 1808. These initial 
efforts are neither especially characteristic nor especially 




FROM A GERMAN CARICATURE COMMEMORATING 
GERMAN SUCCESS IN 1814. 

clever, but they certainly were duly appreciated by the public. 
Joseph Grego, in his interesting and comprehensive work 
upon Rowlandson, says of them : 

" It is certain that the caricaturist's travesties of the little 
Emperor, his burlesques of his great actions and grandiose 
declarations, his figurative displays of the mean origin of the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



49 



imperial family, with the cowardice and depravity of its mem- 
bers, won popular applause. . . And when disasters began 
to cloud the career of Napoleon, as army after army melted 
away, . . . the artist bent his skill to interpret the delight 
of the public. The City competed with the West End in 



hi^rjium Z.J>'i 




"the partition of the map." 
From the collection of John Leonard Dudley, Jr. 

\buying every caricature, in loyal contest to prove their 
national enmity for Bonaparte. In too many cases, the incen- 
tive was to gratify the hatred of the Corsican rather than any 
remarkable merit that could be discovered in the caricatures. 
Very few of these mock-heroic sallies imprint themselves upon 






50 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



the recollection by sheer force of their own brilliancy, as was j 
the case with Gillray, and frequently with John Tenniel. 
Rowlandson and Cruikshank are risible, but not inspired." 

On July 8 Rowlandson began his series with " The 
Corsican Tiger at Bay." Napoleon is depicted as a savage 
tiger, rending four " Royal Greyhounds," quite at his mercy. 
But a fresh pack appears in the background and prepares for 
a fierce charge. The Russian bear and Austrian eagle are 
securely bound with heavy fetters, but the eagle is asking : 
" Now, Brother Bruin, is it time to break our fetters? " 

" The Beast as Described in the Revelations " followed 




" THE CHIEF OF THE GRAND ARMY IN A SAD 
PLIGHT." 

From a French cartoofi of the pei'iod. 

within two weeks. The beast, of Corsican origin, is repre- 
sented with seven heads, and the names of Austria, Naples, 
Holland, Denmark, Prussia, and Russia are inscribed on their 
respective crowns. Napoleon's head, severed from the trunk, 
vomits forth flames. In the distance, cities are blazing, 
showing the destruction wrought by the beast. Spain is 
represented as the champion who alone dares to stand against 
the monster. 

"The Political Butcher" bears date September 12 of 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 51 

the same year. In this print the Spanish Don, in the garb 
of a butcher, is cutting up Bonaparte for the benefit of his 
neighbors. The body of the late Corsican lies before him 
and is being cut up with professional zeal. The Don holds 
up his enemy's heart and calls upon the other Powers to take 
their share. The double-headed eagle of Austria is swoop- 
ing upon Napoleon's head : " I have long wished to strike my 
talons into that diabolical head-piece"; the British bulldog 
has been enjoying portions of the joints, and thinks that he 
would " like to have the picking of that head." The 
Russian bear is luxuriously licking Napoleon's boots, and re- 
marks, " This licking is giving me a mortal inclination to 
pick a bone." 

The final failure of the Spanish campaign is signalized, 
September 20, in a cartoon labeled " Napoleon the Little 
in a Rage with his Great French Eagle." The Emperor, 
with drawn sword and bristling with rage, threatens the 
French imperial eagle, larger than himself. The bird's head 
and one leg are tied up — the result of damage inflicted by the 
Spaniards. " Confusion and destruction! " thunders Napo- 
leon, " what is this I see? Did I not command you not to 
return until you had spread your wing of victory over the 
whole of Spain? " " Aye, it's fine talking," rejoins the bird, 
" but if you had been there, you would not much have liked 
it. The Spanish cormorants pursued me in such a manner 
that they set me molting in a terrible way. I wonder that 
I have not lost my feathers. Besides, it got so hot I could 
not bear it any longer." 

In August, 1809, Rowlandson published "The Rising 
Sun." Bonaparte is surrounded by the Continental powers, 
and is busy rocking to sleep in a cradle the Russian bear, 
securely muzzled with French promises. But the dawn of a 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 53 

new era is breaking : the sun of Spain and Portugal is rising 
with threatening import. The Emperor is disturbed by the 
new light: " This rising sun has set me upon thorns." The 
Prussian eagle is trussed; Denmark is snuffed out. But 
Austria has once more taken heart : " Tyrant, I defy thee and 
thy cursed crew ! " 

The victories of the Peninsular war, and later of the 
disastrous Russian campaign, called forth an ever-increasing 
number of cartoons, which showed little mercy or considera- 
tion to a fallen foe. A sample of the titles of this period show 
the general tendency; he is the " Corsican Bloodhound," the 
"Carcass-Butcher"; he is a jail-bird doing the "Rogues' 
March to the Island of Elba." An analysis of a few of the 
more striking cartoons will serve to close the survey of the 
Napoleonic period. " Death and Bonaparte " is a grew- 
some cartoon by Rowlandson, dated January i, 1814. Na- 
poleon is seated on a drum with his head clasped between his 
hands, staring into the face of a skeleton Death, who is watch- 
ing the baffled general, face to face. Death mockingly 
parodies Napoleon's attitude. A broken eagle, the imperial 
standard, lies at his bony feet. In the background the Rus- 
sian, Prussian, Austrian, and other allied armies are stream- 
ing past in unbroken ranks, routing the dismayed legions of 
France. 

" Bloody Boney, the Corsican Butcher, Left off Trade 
and Retiring to Scarecrow Island " is the title, of still another 
of Rowlandson's characteristic cartoons. In it Napoleon is 
represented as riding on a rough-coated donkey and wearing 
a fool's cap in place of a crown. His only provision is a 
bag of brown bread. His consort is riding on the same 
beast, which is being unmercifully flogged with a stick labeled 
" Baton Marechal." 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



55 



Napoleon's escape from Elba was commemorated by 
Rowlandson in " The Flight of Bonaparte from Hell Bay." 
In it the foul fiend is amusing himself by letting his captive 
loose, to work fresh mischief in the world above. He has 
mounted the Corsican upon a bubble and sends him careering 
upward back to earth, while hissing dragons pour forth 
furious blasts to waft the bubble onward. 

" Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France " is the 




"THE NEW ROBINSON CRUSOE." 
From a German caricature. 

title of still another of Rowlandson's designs, which appeared 
in April, 1815. The head and bust of the Emperor drawn 
on a colossal scale, a hangman's noose around his throat, is 
mounted on a vast pyramid of human heads, his decapitated 
victims. Demons are flying through the air to place upon his 
brow a crown of blazing pitch, while a ring of other excited 
fiends, whose features represent Marechal Ney, Lefebre, Da- 



56 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



voust and others, with horns, hoofs, and tails, are dancing in 
triumph around the idol they have replaced. Closely re- 
sembling this cartoon of Rowlandson is the German cartoon, 
which is reproduced in these pages, showing a double-faced 




" NAPOLEON CAGED BY THE ALLIES. 
From a French cartoon of (he period. 



Napoleon topping a monument built of skulls. Rowland- 
son's " Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France " 
was the last English cartoon directed against Napoleon 
when he was at the head of France. Two months later the 
Emperor's power was finally broken at Waterloo. 



PART II 

FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE CRIMEAN 

WAR 

CHAPTER VII 

AFTER THE DOWNFALL 

WITH the downfall of Napoleon the Gillray 
School of caricature came to an abrupt and very 
natural close. It was a school born of fear and 
nurtured upon rancor — a school that indulged freely in 
obscenity and sacrilege, and did not hesitate to stoop to kick 
the fallen hero, to heap insult and ignominy upon Napoleon 
in his exile. Only during a great world crisis, a death strug- 
gle of nations, could popular opinion have tolerated such 
wanton disregard for decency. And when the crisis was 
passed it came to an end like some malignant growth, 
strangled by its own virulence. The truth is that Gillray 
and Rowlandson led caricature into an impasse; they de- 
liberately perverted its true function, which is, to advance an 
argument with the cogent force of a clever orator, to sum 
up a political issue in terms so simple that a child may read, 
and not merely to echo back the blatant rancor of the mob. 
In the hands of a master of the art it becomes an incisive 
weapon, like the blade with which the matador gives his 
coup-de-grace. Gillray's conception of its office seems to 
have been that of the red rag to be flapped tauntingly in the 
face of John Bull; and John Bull obediently bellowed in 

57 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 59 

response. It would be idle to deny that for the purpose of 
spurring on public opinion, the Napoleonic cartoons exercised 
a potent influence. They kept popular excitement at fever 
heat; they added fuel to the general hatred. But when the 
crisis was passed, when the public pulse was beating normally 
once more, when virulent attacks upon a helpless exile had 
ceased to seem amusing, there really remained no material 
upon which caricature of the Gillray type could exercise its" 
offensive ingenuity. What seemed justifiable license when 
directed against the arch-enemy of European peace would have 
been insufferable when applied to British statesmen and to the 
milder problems of local political issues. Another and quite 
practical reason helps to explain the dearth of political 
caricature in England for a full generation after the battle of 
Waterloo, and that is the question of expense. A public 
which freely gave shillings and even pounds to see its hatred 
of " Little Boney " interpreted with Gillray's vindictive 
malice hesitated to expend even pennies for a cartoon on the 
corn laws or the latest ministerial changes. In England, as 
well as on the Continent, caricature as an effective factor in 
politics remained in abeyance until the advent of an essentially 
modern type of periodical, the comic weekly, of which La 
Caricature, the London Punch, the Fliegende Blatter, and in 
this country Puck and Judge, are the most famous examples. 
The progress of lithography made such a periodical possible 
in France as early as 1830, when La Caricature was founded 
by the famous Philipon; but the oppressive laws of censor- 
ship throughout Europe prevented any wide development of 
this class of journalism until after the general political up- 
heaval of 1848. 

It would be idle, however, to deny that Gillray exerted a 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 61 

lasting influence upon all future caricature. His license, his 
vulgarity, his repulsive perversion of the human face and 
form, have found no disciples in later generations; but his 
effective assemblage of many figures, the crowded significance 
of minor details, the dramatic unity of the whole conception 
which he inherited from Hogarth, have been passed on down 
the line and still continue to influence the leading cartoonists 
of to-day in England, Germany, and the United States, 
although to a much less degree in France. Even at the time 
of Napoleon's downfall the few cartoons which appeared in 
Paris were far less extreme than their English models, while 
the German caricaturists, on the contrary, were extremely 
virulent, notably the Berliner, Schadow, who openly acknowl- 
edged his indebtedness to the Englishman by signing himself 
the Parisian Gillray; and Volz, author of the famous " true 
portrait of Napoleon " — a portrait in which Napoleon's face, 
upon closer inspection, is seen made up of a head of inextrica- 
bly tangled dead bodies, his head surmounted by a bird of 
prey, his breast a map of Europe overspread by a vast spider 
web, in which the different national capitals are entangled like 
so many luckless flies. Had there been more liberty of the 
press, an interesting school of political cartoonists might have 
arisen at this time in Germany. But they met with such scanty 
encouragement that little of real interest is to be gleaned from 
this source until after the advent of the Berlin Kladderadatsch 
in 1848, and the Fliegende Blatter, but a short time earlier. 




Brum tjecomc Mehhatidii y.Myorwfr/Mjo,- Pie ace. 



RUSSIA AS MEDIATOR BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN. 
From the collection of thk. New York Public Library. 




AN AMERICAN CARTOON OF THE WAR OF lSl2. 




WWT HilJLl, u ,*tff l cAl/H'XANm J 7AN&, 



^N 

Come alonD yaw old Hajcal 
did not hno'xi tilt tna\ 



faa-M! Mowuetr Gull you i 
ututtA 
ifhrh 




A CARICATURE OF THE WAR OF 1 8 12 
From the collection of the New York Public Library. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE " POIRE " 

THROUGHOUT the Napoleonic period England 
practically had a monopoly in caricature. During 
the second period, down to the year 1848, France 
is the center of interest. Prior to 1830, French political car- 
toons were neither numerous nor especially significant. In- 
deed they present a simplicity of imagination rather amusing 
as compared with the complicated English caricatures. A 
hate of the Jesuits, a mingling of liberalism, touched with 
Bonapartism, and the war of newspapers furnished the theme. 
The two symbols constantly recurring are the girouette, or 
weather-cock, and the eteignoir, or extinguisher. Many of 
the French statesmen who played a prominent part during the 
French Empire and after the Restoration changed their politi- 
cal creed with such surprising rapidity that it was difficult to 
keep track of their changes. They were accordingly symbo- 
lized by a number of weathercocks proportioned to the num- 
ber of their political conversions, Talleyrand leading the pro- 
cession, with not less than seven to his credit. The eteignoir 
was constantly used in satire directed against the priesthood, 
the most famous instance appearing in the Minerva in 18 19. 
It took for the text a refrain from a song of Beranger. In 
this cartoon the Church is personified by the figure of the Pope 
holding in one hand a sabre, and, in the other, a paper with 
the words Bulls, crusades, Sicilian vespers, St. Bartholomew. 
Beside the figure of the Church, torch in hand, is the demon 

65 



66 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

of discord. From the smoke of the torch of the demon 
various horrors are escaping. We read " the restoration of 
feudal rights," " feudal privileges," " division of families." ; 
Monks are trying to snuff out the memory of Fenelon, Buff on, 
Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, and other philosophers and 
thinkers. For ten years the caricaturists played with this 
theme. A feeble forerunner of La Caricature, entitled he 
Nain Jaune, depended largely for its wit upon the varia- 
tions it could improvise upon the gironette and upon the 
eteignoir. 

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that French art was 
quite destitute of humorists at the beginning of the century. 
M. Armand Dayot, in a monograph upon French cari- 
cature, mentions among others the names of Isabey, Boilly, 
and Carle Vernet as rivaling the English cartoonists in the 
ingenuity of their designs, and surpassing them in artistic 
finish and harmony of color. " But," he adds, " they were 
never able to go below the surface in their satire. It would be 
a mistake to enroll in the hirsute cohort of caricaturists these 
witty and charming artists, who were more concerned in de- 
picting the pleasures of mundane life than in castigating its 
vices and irregularities." The 4th of November, 1830, is a 
momentous date in the history of French caricature. Prior to 
that time, French cartoons, such as there were, were studi- 
ously, even painfully, impersonal. Thackeray, in his delight- 
ful essay upon " Caricatures and Lithography," in the " Paris 
Sketch Book," describes the conditions of this period with the 
following whimsical allegory: 

" As for poor caricature and freedom of the press, they, 
like the rightful princess in a fairy tale, with the merry fan- 
tastic dwarf, her attendant, were entirely in the power of the 
giant who rules the land. The Princess, the press, was so 




^ 



68 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



uU„ 



closely watched and guarded (with some little show, neverthe 
less, of respect for her rank) that she dared not utter a word 
of her own thoughts; and, as for poor Caricature, he was 
gagged and put out of the way altogether." 

On this famous 4th of November, however, there ap- 
peared the initial number of Philipon's La Caricature, which 







PROUDHON. 



was destined to usher in a new era of comic art, and which 
proved the most efficacious weapon which the Republicans 
found to use against Louis Philippe — a weapon as redoubt- 
able as La Lanterne of Henri Rochefort became under the 
Second Empire. Like several of his most famous collabora- 
tors, Charles Philipon was a Meridional. He was born in 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



69 



Lyons at the opening of the century. He studied art in the 
atelier of Gros. He married into the family of an eminent 
publisher of prints, M. Aubert, and was himself suc- 
cessively the editor of the three most famous comic papers 
that France has had, La Caricature, Charivari, and the Jour- 




DIGGING THE GRAVE. 



nal pour Rire. The first of these was a weekly paper. The 
Charivari appeared daily, and at first its cartoons were almost 
exclusively political. Philipon had gathered around him a 
group of artists, men like Daumier, Gavarni, Henry Mon- 
nier, and Travies, whose names afterward became famous, 
and they united in a veritable crusade of merciless ridicule 
against the king, his family, and his supporters. Their satire 
took the form of bitter personal attacks, and a very curious 
contest ensued between the government and the editorial staff 
of the Charivari. As Thackeray sums it up, it was a struggle 
between " half a dozen poor artists on the one side and His 
Majesty Louis Philippe, his august family, and the number- 
less placemen and supporters of the monarchy on the other; it 
was something like Thersites girding at Ajax." Time after 
time were Philipon and his dauntless aids arrested. More 
than a dozen times they lost their cause before a jury, yet each 
defeat was equivalent to a victory, bringing them new sym- 
pathy, and each time they returned to the attack with cartoons 



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FACSIMILE OF THE FAMOUS DEFENSE PRESENTK.D BY PHILIPON WHEN ON TRIAL FOR LIBELING TL 

" Is it my fault, gentlemen of the jury, if his Majesty's face looks like a pear?' J 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 71 

which, if more covert in their meaning, were even more offen- 
sive. Perhaps the most famous of all the cartoons which 
originated in Philipon's fertile brain is that of the " Pear," 
which did so much to turn the countenance of Louis Philippe 
to ridicule — a ridicule which did more than anything else to 
cause him to be driven from the French throne. The " Pear " 
was reproduced in various forms in La Caricature, and after- 
ward in Le Charivari. By inferior artists the " Pear " was 
chalked up on walls all over Paris. The most politically im- 
portant of the " Poire " series was produced when Philipon 
was obliged to appear before a jury to answer for the crime 
of provoking contempt against the King's person by giving 
such a ludicrous version of his face. In his own defense 
Philipon took up a sheet of paper and drew a large Burgundy 
pear, in the lower parts round and capacious, narrower near 
the stalk, and crowned with two or three careless leaves. " Is 
there any treason in that ? " he asked the jury. Then he drew 
a second pear like the first, except that one or two lines were 
scrawled in the midst of it, which bore somehow an odd re- 
semblance to the features of a celebrated personage; and, 
lastly, he produced the exact portrait of Louis Philippe; the 
well-known toupet, the ample whiskers — nothing was extenu- 
ated or set down maliciously. " Gentlemen of the jury," said 
Philipon, " can I help it if His Majesty's face is like a pear? " 
Thackeray, in giving an account of this amusing trial, makes 
the curious error of supposing that Philipon's naive defense 
carried conviction with the jury. On the contrary, Philipon 
was condemned and fined, and immediately took vengeance 
upon the judge and jury by arranging their portraits upon 
the front page of Charivari in the form of a " Pear." In a 
hundred different ways his artists rang the changes upon the 
" pear," and each new attack was the forerunner of a new 



72 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

arrest and trial. One day La Caricature published a design 
representing a gigantic pear surmounting the pedestal in the 
Place de la Concorde, and bearing the legend, " Le monu- 
ment expia-poire." This regicidal pleasantry brought Phili- 
pon once more into court. " The prosecution sees in this a 
provocation to murder ! " cried the accused. " It would be at 
most a provocation to make marmalade." Finally, after a 
picture of a monkey stealing a pear proved to be an indictable 
offense, the subject was abandoned as being altogether too 
expensive a luxury. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE BAITING OF LOUIS PHILIPPE 

BUT although the " Pear " was forced to disappear, 
Philipon continued to harass the government, until 
' Louis Philippe, who had gained his crown largely by 
his championship of the freedom of the press, was driven in 
desperation to sanction the famous September laws, which vir- 
tually strangled its liberty. Yet, in spite of the obstacles thrown 
in their way, the work of Philipon and of the remarkable corps 
of satirical geniuses which he gathered round him, forms a 
pictorial record in which the intimate history of France, from 
Charles X.'s famous coup d'etat down to the revolution of 
1848, may be read like an open book. The adversaries of 
the government of 1830 were of two kinds. One kind, of 
which Admiral Carrel was a type, resorted to passionate argu- 
ment, to indignant eloquence. The other kind resorted to the 
methods of the Fronde; they made war by pin-pricks, by 
bursts of laughter, with all the resources of French gayety 
and wit. In this method the leading spirit was Philipon, who 
understood clearly the power that would result from the 
closest alliance between la presse et I 'image. Even before 
La Caricature was founded the features of the last of the 
Bourbons became a familiar subject in cartoons. Invariably 
the same features are emphasized; a tall, lank figure, fre- 
quently contorted like the " india-rubber man " of the dime 
museums; a narrow, vacuous countenance, a high, receding 
forehead, over which sparse locks of hair are straggling; a 
salient jaw, the lips drawn back in a mirthless grin, revealing 

73 



.V- Jb* >-*v & 




THE PIOUS MONARCH. CARICATURE OF CHARLES X. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



75 



huge, ungainly teeth, projecting like the incisors of a horse. 
In one memorable cartoon he is expending the full crushing 
power of these teeth upon the famous " charter" of 1830, 
but is finding it a nut quite too hard to crack. 

From the very beginning La Caricature assumed an atti- 




CHARLES X. IN THE R6LE OF THE "GREAT 
NUTCRACKER." 

In this caricature Charles X. is attempting 
to break with his teeth a billiard ball on which 
is written the word " Charter." The cartoon 
is entitled "The Great Nutcracker of July 
25th, or the Impotent Horse-jaw " (ganache) — 
a play upon words. 

tude of hostile suspicion toward Louis Philippe, the pretended 
champion of the bourgeoisie, whose veneer of expedient re- 
publicanism never went deeper than to send his children to the 



76 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

public schools, and to exhibit himself parading the streets of 
Paris, umbrella in hand. Two cartoons which appeared in 
the early days of his reign, and are labeled respectively " Ne 
voiis y frottez pas " and " // v'a bon train, le Ministere! " 
admirably illustrate the public lack of confidence. The first 
of these, an eloquent lithograph by Daumier, represents a 
powerfully built and resolute young journeyman printer stand- 
ing with hands clinched, ready to defend the liberty of the 
press. In the background are two groups. In the one 
Charles X., already worsted in an encounter, lies prone upon 
the earth ; in the other Louis Philippe, waving his ubiquitous 
umbrella, is with difficulty restrained from assuming the ag- 
gressive. 1 he second of these cartoons is more sweeping in 
its indictment. It represents the sovereign and his ministers 
in their " chariot of state," one and all lashing the horses into 
a mad gallop toward a bottomless abyss. General Soult, the 
Minister of War, is flourishing and snapping a military flag, 
in place of a whip. At the back of the chariot a Jesuit has 
succeeded in securing foothold upon the baggage, and is 
adding his voice to hasten the forward march, all symbolic of 
the violent momentum of the reactionary movement. 

It was not likely that the part which Louis Philippe played 
in the revolution of 1789, his share in the republican victories 
of Jemappes and of Valmy, would be forgotten by those who 
saw in him only a pseudo-republican, a "citizen king" in 
name only, and who seized eagerly upon the opportunity of 
mocking at his youthful espousal of republicanism. The 
names of these battles recur again and again in the caricature 
of the period, in the legends, in maps conspicuously hung upon 
the walls of the background. An anonymous cut represents 
the public gazing eagerly into a magic lantern, the old 
" Poire " officiating as showman: " You have before you 




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78 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

the conqueror of Jemappes and of Valmy. You see him sur- 
rounded by his nobles, his generals, and his family, all ready 
to die in his defense. See how the jolly rascals fight. They 
are not the ones to be driven in disgrace from their kingdom. 
Oh, no ! " Of all the cartoons touching upon Louis Philippe's 
insincerity, probably the most famous is that of Daumier com- 
memorating the death of Lafayette. The persistent popu- 
larity of this veteran statesman had steadily become more 
and more embarrassing to a government whose reactionary 
doctrines he repudiated, and whose political corruption he 
despised. " Enfonce Lafayette/ . . . Attrape, mon 
vieux! " is the legend inscribed beneath what is unquestion- 
ably one of the most extraordinary of all the caricatures of 
Honore Daumier. It represents Louis Philippe watching the 
funeral cortege of Lafayette, his hands raised to his face in 
the pretense of grief, but the face behind distorted into a hide- 
ous leer of gratification. M. Arsene Alexandre, in his re- 
markable work on Daumier, describes this splendid drawing 
in the following terms: "Under a grey sky, against the 
somber and broken background of a cemetery, rises on a little 
hillock the fat and black figure of an undertaker's man. Be- 
low him on a winding road is proceeding a long funeral pro- 
cession. It is the crowd that has thronged to the obsequies of 
the illustrious patriot. Through the leafage of the weeping 
willows may be seen the white tombstones. The whole scene 
bears the mark of a profound sadness, in which the principal 
figure seems to join, if one is to judge by his sorrowful atti- 
tude and his clasped hands. But look closer. If this under- 
taker's man, with the features of Louis Philippe, is clasping 
his hands, it is simply to rub them together with joy; and 
through his fingers, half hiding his countenance, one may 
detect a sly grin." The obsequious attitude of the members 



8o CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

of Parliament came in for its share of satirical abuse. " This 
is not a Chamber, it is a Kennel," is the title of a spirited 
lithograph by Grandville, representing the French statesmen 
as a pack of hounds fawning beneath the lash of their im- 
perious keeper, Casimir-Perier. Another characteristic car- 
toon of Grandville's represents the legislature as an " Infernal 
laboratory for extracting the quintessence of politics" — a 
composition which, in its crowded detail, its grim and uncanny 
suggestiveness, and above all its bizarre distortions of the 
human face and form, shows more plainly than the work of 
any other French caricaturist the influence of Gillray. A 
collection of grinning skulls are labeled " Analysis of Human 
Thought "; state documents of Louis Philippe are being cut 
and weighed and triturated, while in the foreground a legis- 
lator with distended cheeks is wasting an infinite lot of breath 
upon a blowpipe in his effort to distill the much-sought-for 
quintessence from a retort filled with fragments of the words 
" Bonapartism," " anarchy," '' equality," " republic," etc. 
One of the palpable results of the " political quintessence " 
of Louis Philippe's government took the form of heavy im- 
posts, and these also afforded a subject for Grandville's 
graphic pencil. " The Public Thrown to the Imposts in the 
Great Pit of the Budget " first appeared in La Caricature. It 
represented the various taxes under which France was suffer- 
ing in the guise of strange and unearthly animals congregated 
in a sort of bear pit, somewhat similar to the one which at- 
tracts the attention of all visitors to the city of Berne. The 
spectacle is one given by the government in power for the 
amusement of all those connected in any way with public 
office; in other words, the salaried officials who draw their 
livelihood from the taxes imposed upon the people. It is for 
their entertainment that the tax-paying public is being hurled 



■ if: 








82 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

to the monsters below — monsters more uncouth and fantastic 
than even Mr. H. G. Wells's fertile brain conceived in his 
" War of the Worlds," or " First Men in the Moon." Dau- 
mier in his turn had to have his fling at the ministerial benches 
of the government of July — the " prostituted Chamber of 
1834." At the present day, when the very names of the 
men whom he attacked are half forgotten, his famous car- 
toon, " Le Ventre Legislatif," is still interesting; yet it is 
impossible to realize the impression it must have made in the 
days when every one of those " ventrigoulus," those rotund, 
somnolent, inanely smiling old men, with the word " bour- 
geoisie " plainly written all over them, were familiar figures 
in the political world, and Daumier's presentment of them, 
one and all, a masterly indictment of complacent incapacity. 
As between Daumier and Grandville, the two leading lights 
of La Caricature, there is little question that the former was 
the greater. Balzac, who was at one time one of the editors 
of La Caricature, writing under pseudonym of " Comte 
Alexandre de B.," and was the source of inspiration of one of 
its leading features, the curious Etudes de Genre, once said of 
Daumier: " Ce gaillard-la, mes enfants, a du Michel-Ange 
sous la peau." Balzac took Daumier under his protection 
from the beginning. His first counsel to him was: " If you 
wish to become a great artist, faites des dettes! " Grandville 
has been defined by later French critics as un nevrose, a bitter 
and pessimistic soul. It was he who produced the cruelest 
compositions that ever appeared in La Caricature. He had, 
however, some admirable pages to his credit, among others 
his interpretation of Sebastian's famous " L'Ordre regne a 
Varsovie." Fearfully sinister is the field of carnage, with 
the Cossack, with bloody pique, mounting guard, smok- 
ing his pipe tranquilly, on his face the horrible expression 




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O o 



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8 4 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



of satisfaction over a work well done. Grandville also con- 
ceived the idea, worthy of a great cartoonist, of Processions 
and Corteges. These enabled him to have pass before the 
eye, under costumes, each conveying some subtle irony or 
allusion, all the political men in favor. Every occasion was 




THE RESUSCITATION OF THE FRENCH CENSORSHIP. 
By Grandville. 






good. A religious procession, and the men of the day ap- 
peared as choir boys, as acolytes, etc. Uti vote de budget, 
and then it was line marche de boeuf gras, with savages, 
musketeers, clowns forming the escort of " M . Gros, gras 
et bete." It is easy to guess who was the personage so desig- 





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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 87 

nated. Nothing is more amusing than these pages, full of a 
verve, soutenue de pince sans r'ire. 

It is one of the many little ironies of Louis Philippe's 
reign that, after having owed his election to his supposed 
advocacy of freedom of the press, he should in less than two 
years take vigorous measures to stifle it. Some of the best 
known cartoons that appeared in La Caricature deal with this 
very subject. One of these, which bears the signature of 
Grandville and is marked by all the vindictive bitterness of 
which that artist was the master, represents Louis Philippe 
in the role of Bluebeard, who, dagger in hand, is about to 
slay his latest wife. The wife, the " Constitution," lies 
prostrate, bound with thongs. The corpses of this political 
Bluebeard's other victims may be seen through the open door 
of the secret chamber. Leaning over the balcony and scan- 
ning the horizon is the figure of Sister Anne, in this case 
symbolic of the Press. The unfortunate " Constitution," 
feeling that her last minute has come, calls out: "Sister 
Press, do you see nothing coming?" The Press replies: 
" I see only the sun of July beating down, powdering the 
dusty road and parching the green fields." Again the Con- 
stitution cries : " Sister Press, do you see nothing com- 
ing?" And this time the Press calls back: "I see two 
cavaliers urging their horses across the plain and carrying a 
banner." Below the castle of Bluebeard may be seen the 
figures of the two cavaliers. The banner which they carry 
bears the significant word, " Republic! " 

Another cartoon bearing upon the same subject represents 
Liberty wearing a Phrygian cap, driving the chariot of the 
sun. The King and his ministers and judges, above whom a 
crow hovers ominously, flapping its black wings, are seeking 
to stop the course of liberty by thrusting between the spokes 



88 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



of the wheels sticks and rods inscribed " Lawsuits against the 
Press," while Talleyrand comes to their aid by throwing 
beneath the wheels stones symbolizing " standing armies," 
" imposts," " holy alliance," and so forth. This cartoon is 
inscribed: " It would be easier to stop the course of the sun," 
and is the work of Travies, \vho is best known as the creator 
of the grotesque hunchback figure, " Mayeux." 










BARBARISM AND THE CHOLERA INVADING EUROPE IN 1831. 





RAID ON THE WORKSHOP OF THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS. 



A : 



CHAPTER X 

MAYEUX AND ROBERT MACAIRE 

PECULIAR feature of French caricature, espe- 
cially after political subjects were largely forbid- 
den, was the creation of certain famous types who 
soon became familiar to the French public, and whose reap- 
pearances from day to day in new and ever grotesque situa- 
tions were hailed with growing delight. Such were the 
Mayeux of Travies and the Macaire and Bertrand of Dau- 
mier, who in course of time became as celebrated, in a certain 
sense, as the heroes of " The Three Musketeers." In his 
" Curiosites Esthetiques " Beaudelaire has told the story of 
the origin of Mayeux. " There was," he says, " in Paris a 
sort of clown named Le Claire, who had the run of various 
low resorts and theaters. His specialty was to make tetes 
d 'expression, that is, by a series of facial contortions he 
would express successively the various human passions. This 
man, a clown by nature, was very melancholy and possessed 
with a mad desire for friendship. All the time not occupied 
in practice and in giving his grotesque performances he spent 
in searching for a friend, and when he had been drinking, 
tears of solitude flowed freely from his eyes. Travies saw 
him. It was a time when the great patriotic enthusiasm of 
July was still at its height. A luminous idea entered his 
brain. Mayeux was created, and for a long time afterward 
this same turbulent Mayeux talked, screamed, harangued, 
and gesticulated in the memory of the people of Paris." 
In a hundred different guises, in the blue blouse of the 

9° 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



9i 



workman, the apron of the butcher, the magisterial gown 
of judge or advocate, this hunchback Mayeux, this misshapen 
parody upon humanity, endeared himself to the Parisian 
public. Virulent, salacious, corrupt, he was a sort of French 
Mr. Hyde — the shadow of secret weaknesses and vices, lurk- 




TRAVIES'S "MAYEUX." 

" Adam destroyed us by the apple ; Lafayette by the pear." 

ing behind the Dr. Jekyll of smug bourgeois respectability; 
and the French public recognized him as a true picture of their 
baser selves. They laughed indulgently over the broad, 
Rabelaisian jests that unfailingly accompanied each new 



92 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

cartoon — jests which M. Dayot has admirably characterized 
as " seasoned with coarse salt, more German than Gallic, and 
forming a series of legends which might be made into a 
veritable catechism of pornography." This Mayeux series 
is not, strictly speaking, political in its essence. It touches 
upon all sides of life, without discrimination and without 
respect. It even trespasses upon the subject of that forbidden 
fruit, " Le Poire." In an oft-cited cartoon, Mayeux with 
extended arms, his head sunken lower than usual between his 
huddled shoulders, is declaiming: "Adam destroyed us with 
the apple; Lafayette has destroyed us with the pear! " And 
later, when repeated arrests, verdicts, fines, edicts had ban- 
ished politics from the arena of caricature, Mayeux was still 
a privileged character. Like Chicot, the jester, who could 
speak his mind fearlessly to his " Henriquet," while the ordi- 
nary courtier cringed obsequiously, Mayeux shared the 
proverbial privilege of children and buffoons, to speak the 
truth. And oftentimes it was not even necessary for his 
creator, Travies, to manifest any overt political significance; 
the public were always more than ready to look for it below 
the surface. In such a picture as that of Mayeux, in Napo- 
leonic garb striking an attitude before a portrait of the Little 
Corporal and exclaiming, " Comme je lui ressemble! " they 
inevitably discovered a hint that there were other hypocrites 
more august than Mayeux who fancied themselves worthy of 
filling Napoleon's shoes. 

Even more famous than Mayeux are the Macaire and 
Bertrand series, the joint invention of Philipon, who supplied 
the ideas and the text, and of Daumier, who executed the 
designs. According to Thackeray, whose analysis of these 
masterpieces of French caricature has become classic, they had 
their origin in an old play, the "Auberge des Adrets," in which 




ieurs Macaire and Bertrand have found it expedient to make a hurried departure for 
m for the purpose of evading French justice. The eloquent Macaire, on reaching 
ntier, declaims as follows ; " Hail to thee, O land of hospitality ! Hail, fatherland of 
vho haven't got any ! Sacred refuge of all unfortunates proscribed by human justice, 
To all drooping hearts Belgium is dear." 



94 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



two thieves escaped from the galleys were introduced, Robert 
Macaire, the clever rogue, and Bertrand, his friend, the 
" butt and scapegoat on all occasions of danger." The play 
had been half-forgotten when it was revived by a popular and 
clever actor, Frederick Lemaitre, who used it as a vehicle for 
political burlesque. The play was suppressed, but he Chari- 
vari eagerly seized upon the idea and continued it from day to 




EXTINGUISHED 



day in the form of a pictorial puppet show, of which the pub- 
lic never seemed to weary. Thackeray's summary of the 
characters of these two illustrious rascals can scarcely be im- 
proved upon : 

" M. Robert Macaire [he says] is a compound of Field- 
ing's ' Elueskin ' and Goldsmith's ' Beau Tibbs.' He has the 
dirt and dandyism of the one, with the ferocity of the other: 
sometimes he is made to swindle, but where he can get a 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



95 



shilling more, M. Macaire will murder without scruple; he 
performs one and the other act (or any in the scale between 
them) with a similar bland imperturbability, and accompanies 
his actions with such philosophical remarks as may be 
expected from a person of his talents, his energies, his amiable 
life and character. Bertrand is the simple recipient of 
Macaire's jokes, and makes vicarious atonement for his 
crimes, acting, in fact, the part which pantaloon performs in 




LOUIS PHILIPPE AS CAIN WITH THE ANGELS OF 
JUSTICE IN PURSUIT. 

the pantomime, who is entirely under the fatal influence of 
clown. He is quite as much a rogue as that gentleman, but 
he has not his genius and courage. . . Thus Robert Macaire 
and his companion Bertrand are made to go through the 
world; both swindlers, but the one more accomplished than 
the other. Both robbing all the world, and Robert robbing 
his friend, and, in the event of danger, leaving him faithfully 
in the lurch. There is, in the two characters, some grotesque 
good for the spectator — a kind of ' Beggars' Opera ' 
moral. . . And with these two types of clever and stupid 
knavery, M. Philipon and his companion Daumier have 



96 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 






created a world of pleasant satire upon all the prevailing 
abuses of the day." 

The Macaire andBertrand series were less directly political 
in their scope than that of Travies's hunchback; at least, their 
political allusions were more carefully veiled. Yet the first 
of the series had portrayed in Macaire's picturesque green 
coat and patched red trousers no less a personage than the 
old " Poire " himself, and the public remembered it. When 
politics were banished from journalism they persisted in 
finding in each new escapade of Macaire and Bertrand an 




LAUGHING JOHN — CRYING JOHN. 

July, 1830. February, 1848. 

allusion to some fresh scandal, if not connected with the King 
himself, at least well up in the ranks of governmental hypo- 
crites. And, although the specific scandals upon which they 
are based, the joint-stock schemes for floating worthless 
enterprises, the thousand-and-one plausible humbugs of the 
period, are now forgotten, to those who take the trouble to 
read between the lines, these masterpieces of Daumier's 
genius form a luminous exposition of the morale of the 
government and the court circles. 



CHAPTER XI 

FROM CRUIKSHANK TO LEECH 

IN contrast with the brilliancy of the French artists, the 
work in England during these years, at least prior to 
the establishment of Punch, is distinctly disappointing. 
rhe one man who might have raised caricature to an even 
ligher level than that of Gillray and Rowlandson was 
George Cruikshank, but he withdrew early in life from 
political caricature, preferring, like Hogarth, to concentrate 
lis talent upon the dramatic aspects of contemporary social 
ife. Yet at the outset of his career, just as he was coming of 
ige, Cruikshank produced one cartoon that has remained 
famous because it anticipated by thirty years the attitude of 
Mill and Cobden in 1 846. It was in 1 8 1 5, just after the bat- 
:le of Waterloo had secured an era of peace for Europe, that 
le produced his protest against the laws restricting the im- 
3ortation of grain into England. He called it " The Bless- 
ngs of Peace; or, the Curse of the Corn Bill." A cargo of 
foreign grain has just arrived and is being offered for sale by 
:he supercargo: " Here is the best for fifty shillings." On 
:he shore a group of British landholders wave the foreigner 
iway : " We won't have it at any price. We are determined 
to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the poor 
\an't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." In the 
Dackground a storehouse with tight-shut doors bulges 
with home-grown grain. A starving family stand watching 
while the foreign grain is thrown overboard, and the father 
»ays: "No, no, masters, I'll not starve, but quit my native 

97 



9 8 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

land, where the poor are crushed by those they labor to sup- 
port, and retire to one more hospitable, and where the arts 
of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of God." 
After Cruikshank, until the advent of the men who made 
Punch famous, — Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, 
and their successors, — there are no cartoonists in England 
whose work rises above mediocrity. When the death of 
Canning brought Wellington and Peel into power, a series of 
colored prints bearing the signature H. Heath, and persist- 
ently lampooning the new ministry, enjoyed a certain vogue. 
They scarcely rose above the level of the penny comic valen- 
tine, which they much resembled in crudeness of color and 
poverty of invention. One set, entitled " Our Theatrical 
Celebrities," depicted the Premier as stage manager, the 
other members of the cabinet as leading man, premiere 
danseuse, prompter, etc. Another series depicts the same 
statesmen as so many thoroughbreds, to be auctioned off to the 
highest bidder, and describes the good points of each in the 
most approved language of the turf. Lot No. i is the Duke 
of Wellington, described as " the famous charger, Arthur "; 
Lot No. 2 is Peel, the " Good Old Cobb, Bobby," and the 
rest of the series continue the same vein of inane witticism. 
Somewhat more point is to be found in the portrayal of Well- 
ington buried up to his neck in his own boot — one of the 
universal Wellington boots of the period. The cartoonist's 
thought, quite obviously, was that the illustrious hero of 
Waterloo had won his fame primarily in boots and spurs, 
and that as a statesman he became a very much shrunken and 
insignificant figure. In its underlying thought this cartoon 
suggests comparison with the familiar " Grandpa's Hat " 
cartoons of the recent Harrison administration. Very rarely 
Heath broke away from home politics and touched upon in- 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



99 



ternational questions of the day. A print showing the 
Premier engaged in the task of " making a rushlight," which 
he is just withdrawing cautiously from a large tub labeled 
" Greece," is an allusion to the part played by Great Britain 




THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON IN CARICATURE 
Fro7ii the collection of the New York Public Librai-y. 

in helping to add the modest light of Greek independence to 
the general illumination of civilized Europe. 
I Another man whose work enjoyed a long period of shop- 
window popularity, and who nevertheless did not always rise 
above the comic-valentine level, was John Doyle, who owes 
his memory less to his own work than to the fact that he was 
the father of a real master of the art, Richard Doyle. Par- 
ton, in his history of " Caricature and Other Comic Art," 
LofC. 



ioo CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

notes the elder Doyle's remarkable prolificness, estimating his 
collected prints at upward of nine hundred; and he continues : 
" It was a custom with English print-sellers to keep portfolios 
of his innocent and amusing pictures to let out by the evening 
to families about to engage in the arduous work of entertain- 
ing their friends at dinner. He excelled greatly in his por- 
traits, many of which, it is said by contemporaries, are the 
best ever taken of the noted men of that day, and may safely 
be accepted as historical. Brougham, Peel, O'Connell, 
Hume, Russell, Palmerston, and others appear in his 
works as they were in their prime, with little distortion 
or exaggeration, the humor of the pictures being in the 
situation portrayed. Thus, after a debate in which allusion 
was made to an ancient egg anecdote, Doyle produced a 
caricature in which the leaders of parties were drawn as hens 
sitting upon eggs. The whole interest of the picture lies in 
the speaking likeness of the men." 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BEGINNING OF " PUNCH " 

WHAT the advent of La Caricature did for 
French comic art was done for England by the 
birth of Punch, the " London Charivari," on 
July 17, 1 84 1. It is not surprising that this veteran organ 
of wit and satire, essentially British though it is in the quality 
and range of its humor, should have inspired a number of 
different writers successively to record its annals. Mr. M. 
H. Spielmann, whose admirable volume is likely to remain 
the authoritative history, points out that the very term " car- 
toon " in its modern sense is in reality a creation of Punch's. 
In the reign of Charles I., he says, the approved phrase was, 
" a mad designe "; in the time of George II. it was known 
as a " hieroglyphic "; throughout the golden age of Gillray 
and Cruikshank " caricature " was the epithet applied to the 
separate copperplate broadsides displayed in the famous 
shops of Ackermann, Mrs. Humphrey, and McClean. But 
it was not until July, 1843, when the first great exhibition of 
cartoons for the Houses of Parliament was held — gigantic 
designs handling the loftiest subjects in the most elevated 
artistic spirit — that Punch inaugurated his own sarcastic series 
of " cartoons," and by doing so permanently enriched the 
anguage with a new word, or rather with new meaning for 
an old word. Punch, however, did far more than merely to 
change the terminology of caricature; he revolutionized its 
spirit; he made it possible for Gladstone to say of it that " in 
his early days, when an artist was engaged to produce political 



102 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

satires, he nearly always descended to gross personal carica- 
ture, and sometimes to indecency. To-day the humorous 
press showed a total absence of vulgarity and a fairer treat- 
ment, which made this department of warfare always 
pleasing." 

As in the case of other famous characters of history, the 
origin and parentage of Punch have been much disputed, and 
a variety of legends have grown up about the source of its 
very name, the credit for its genesis being variously assigned 
to its original editors, Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, the 
printer Joseph Last, the writer Douglas Jerrold, and a 
number of obscurer literary lights. One story cited by Mr. 
Spielmann, although clearly apocryphal, is nevertheless 
worthy of repetition. According to this story, somebody at 
one of the preliminary meetings spoke of the forthcoming 
paper as being like a good mixture of punch, good for nothing 
without Lemon, when Mayhew caught up the idea and cried, 
" A capital idea ! We'll call it Punch! " 

In marked contrast to its French prototype, the " London 
Charivari " was from the beginning a moderate organ, and a 
stanch supporter of the Crown. In its original prospectus 
its political creed was outlined as follows: "Punch has no 
party prejudices; he is conservative in his opposition to 
Fantoccini and political puppets, but a progressive whig in his 
love of small change and a repeal of the union with public 
Judies." And to this day this policy of " hitting all 
around," of avoiding any bitter and prolonged partisanship, 
is the keynote of Punch's popularity and prestige. How this 
attitude has been consistently maintained in its practical work 
ing is well brought out by Mr. Spielmann in his chapter 
dedicated to the periodic Punch dinners, where the editorial 
councils have always taken place : 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



103 



" When the meal is done and cigars and pipes are duly 
lighted, subjects are deliberately proposed in half a dozen 
quarters, until quite a number may be before the Staff. They 




THE LAND OF LIBERTY. 



are fought all round the Table, and unless obviously and 
strikingly good, are probably rejected or attacked with good- 
humored ridicule or withering scorn. . . And when the sub- 
ject of a cartoon is a political one, the debate grows hot and 
the fun more furious, and it usually ends by Tories and 



104 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Radicals accepting a compromise, for the parties are pretty 
evenly balanced at the Table; while Mr. Burnand assails both 
sides with perfect indifference. At last, when the intellectual 
tug-of-war, lasting usually from half-past eight for just an 




'WHAT? YOU YOUNC YANKEE-NOODLE, STRIKE YOUR OWA FATHER J 



hour and three-quarters by the clock, is brought to a con- 
clusion, the cartoon in all its details is discussed and deter- 
mined; and then comes the fight over the title and the 
' cackle,' amid all the good-natured chaff and banter of a 
pack of boisterous, high-spirited schoolboys." 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



105 



Down to the close of the period covered in the present 
chapter, the cartoon played a relatively small part in the 
weekly contents of Punch, averaging barely one a week, and 



MR PUNCH'S VICTORIAN ERA 



1184 7 




LOUIS PHILIPPE AS " THE NAPOLEON OF PEACE." 

From the collection of the New York Public Library. 

being omitted altogether from many numbers. During these 
years the dominating spirit was unquestionably John Leech, 
who produced no less than two hundred and twenty-three 
cartoons out of a total of three hundred and fourteen, or more 



io6 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

than twice as many as all the other contributors put together. 
He first appeared with a pageful of " Foreign Affairs " in the 
fourth issue of Punch — a picture of some huddled groups of 
foreign refugees — a design remembered chiefly because it for 
the first time introduced to the world the artist's sign-manual, 
a leech wriggling in a water bottle. 

Of Doyle's political plates during these early years, none 
is more interesting to the American reader than the few rare 
occasions upon which he seeks to express the British im- 
pression of the United States. One of these, " The Land of 
Liberty," appeared in 1847. A ^ ean an d lanky, but beard- 
less, LTncle Sam tilts lazily back in his rocking-chair, a six- 
shooter in his hand, a huge cigar between his teeth. One 
foot rests carelessly upon a bust of Washington, which he 
has kicked over. The other is flung over the back of another 
chair in sprawling insolence. In the ascending clouds of 
smoke appear the Stars and Stripes, surrounded by a pano- 
rama of outrages, duels, barroom broils, lynch law, etc., and 
above them all, the contending armies of the Mexican war, 
over whom a gigantic devil hovers, his hands extended in a 
malignant benediction. A closely analogous cartoon of this 
same year by Richard Doyle sharply satirized Louis Philippe 
as the " Napoleon of Peace," and depicted in detail the 
unsatisfactory condition of European affairs as seen from the 
British vantage ground. As a consequence of this cartoon 
Punch was for some time excluded from Paris. 

From 1848 onward the cartoons in Punch look upon the 
world politics from a constantly widening angle. Indeed, 
the same remark holds good for the comic organs not only of 
England, but of France, Germany, Italy, and the other lead- 
ing nations as well. Throughout the second half of the nine- 
teenth century the international relations of the leading 



io8 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

powers may be followed almost without a break in the car- 
toons of Punch and Judy, of the Fliegende Blatter and the 
Kladderadatsch, of Don Pirlone, of the Journal pour Rlre, of 
Life and Puck and Judge, and the countless host of their 
followers and imitators. 






CHAPTER XIII 

RETROSPECTIVE 

THE close of the first half of the nineteenth century 
marks a convenient moment for a backward 
glance. These fifty years, which began with the 
consulship of the first Napoleon and closed on the eve of the 
third Napoleon's coup d'etat, witnessed the rise and fall of 
more than one Napoleonic spirit in the realm of comic art. 
It was essentially a period of individualism, of the one-man 
power in caricature. Existing conditions forbade a logical 
and unbroken development of the political cartoon; it evolved 
only by fits and starts. It was often less an expression of the 
popular mood than a vehicle for personal enthusiasm or per- 
sonal rancor; at the hands of just a few masters, it verged 
upon the despotic. At intervals, first in one country and then 
in another, a Gillray, a Rowlandson, a Daumier, would blaze 
forth, brilliant, erratic, meteor-like, leaving behind them a 
trail of scintillating suggestion, destined to fire some new 
fuse, to start caricature along some new curve of eccentricity. 
The importance of these fifty years, the lasting influence of 
these forerunners of the modern cartoonists, must not be 
underrated. Without the inspiration of their brilliant 
successes, and, it may also be added, the useful lessons of their 
errors and failures, the cartoon of to-day would be radically 
different, and probably greatly inferior to what it is. Above 
all, they taught, by two tremendous object lessons, the potent 
force that lies in pictorial satire — by the share which English 
cartoonists had in the overthrow of Napoleon I., and which 






I 12 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



French cartoonists had in the downfall of Louis Philippe. 
But itwas only with the advent of the modern comic weekly of 
the high type represented by Punch that it became possible 
to develop schools of caricature with definite aims and es- 




DAUMIER 
Caricatured by Benjamin. 

Daumier fut le peintre ordinaire 
Des pairs, des deputes et des Robert-Macaire. 
Son rude crayon fait l'histoire de nos jours. 
— O l'etonnante boule ! 6 la bonne figure ! 
— Je le crois pardieu bien, car Daumier est 
toujours Excellent en caricature. 

tablished traditions — schools that have tended steadily to 
eliminate and reject the old-time elements of vulgarity and 
exaggeration, to gain the increased influence that comes from 
sobriety of method and higher artistic excellence, and to hold 
erratic individuality in check. Few people who are not 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 113 

directly concerned in its making ever realize how essentially 
the modern caricature is a composite production. Take, for 
example, the big, double-page cartoon which has become such 
a familiar weekly feature in Puck or Judge, with its com- 
plicated group of figures, its suggestive background, its mul- 
titude of clever minor points; the germ idea has been picked 
out from perhaps a dozen others, as the result of careful 
deliberation, and from this starting point the whole design 
has been built up, detail by detail, representing the joint 
cleverness of the entire editorial staff. But the collaboration 
reaches further back than this. A political cartoon resembles 
in a way a composite photograph, which embodies not merely 
the superimposed features of the men who sat before the 
camera, but something also of the countless generations before 
them, who have made their features what they are by trans- 
mitting from father to son something of their own 
personality. In the same way, the political cartoon of to- 
day is the product of a gradual evolution, mirroring back the 
familiar features of many a cartoon of the past. It is not 
merely an embodiment of the ideas of the satirists who sug- 
gested it and the artist who drew it, but also of many a tradi- 
tional and stereotyped symbol, bequeathed from generation 
to generation by artists dead and gone. The very essence 
of pictorial satire, its alpha and omega, so to speak, is sym- 
bolism, the use of certain established types, conventional 
personifications of Peace and War, Death and Famine and 
Disease, Father Time with his scythe, the Old Year and the 
New; the Russian Bear, the British Lion, and the American 
Eagle; Uncle Sam and Columbia, Britannia and John Bull. 
These figures, as we have them to-day, cannot point to any 
one creator. They are not an inspiration of the moment, 
a stroke of genius, like Daumier's " Macaire " or Travies's 



ii 4 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 






" Mayeux." They are the product of a century of evolution, 
a gradual survival of the fittest, resulting from the uncon- 
scious natural selection of popular approval. No better 
specific instance can be taken than that of the familiar figure 
of John Bull as he appears from week to week in the con- 
temporary pages of Punch ,iov his descent may be traced in an 
unbroken line — there are no missing links. No single 
British caricaturist, from Gillray to Du Maurier, can claim 
the credit for having invented him; yet each in his turn has 
contributed something, a touch here, a line there, toward 
making him what he is to-day. As Mr. Spielmann has 
pointed out, the earliest prototype of Punch's John Bull is to 
be sought in Gillray's conception of " Farmer George," that 
figured in a long series of malevolent caricatures depicting 
George III., as a gaping country lout, a heavy, dull-witted 
yokel. There is no more curious paradox in the history of 
caricature than that this figure of " Farmer George," con- 
ceived in pure malice as a means of inspiring resentment 
against a king popularly believed to care more for his farm- 
yard than for the interests of his subjects, should by gradual 
transition have come to be accepted as the symbolic figure of 
the nation. Yet the successive steps are easy enough to 
understand. When Gillray's point of attack had shifted 
from the throne of England to the throne of France, his 
type of " Farmer George " needed but slight modification to 
become a huge, ungainly ogre, the incarnation of British 
wrath against " Little Boney " — shaking a formidable fist at 
the coast of Calais, wading knee-deep across the channel, or 
greedily opening a cavernous jaw to take in a soul-satisfying 
meal of French frigates. But beneath the exaggerated 
ferocity of Gillray's extreme type, the idea of a farmer as the 
national figure is never quite lost sight of. In Gillray's later 




JOHN I.EECH (1857) 




CRU1KSHANK (1820; 





MR. JOHN BULL AT HOME. 
SIR JOHN TENN1RL IN "PUNCH" (1850). 




JOHN PHILLIPS U829) 





JAMES G1I.LRAY (1795). 



JOHN BULL AT HOME. — JAMES G1LLRAY (1700). THOMAS ROWLANDSON (1793) 



THE EVOLUTION OF JOHN BULL. 



u6 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 






cartoons the conception of John Bull had already taken on a 
more consistent and definite form. At the hands of Row- 
landson and Woodward he lost much of his uncouthness and 
began to assume a mellower and more benignant aspect; a 
cartoon by the latter, entitled " Genial Rays," pictures him 
reclining luxuriously upon a bed of roses, basking in " the sun 




HENRI MONNIER IN THK ROLE OF JOSEPH PRUD- 
HOMME. 

" Never shall my daughter become the wife of 
a scribbler." 

By Daumier 

of patriotism," the image of agricultural contentment. A 
certain coarseness and vulgarity, however, clung to him until 
well down into the forties, when the refining touch of Leech 
and Tenniel gradually idealized him into the portly, choleric, 
well-to-do rural gentleman who is to-day such a familiar 
figure the world over. This type of John Bull as the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 117 

representative Briton once called forth some thoroughly 
characteristic comments from John Ruskin. " Is it not 
surely," he asks, " some overruling power in the nature of 
things, quite other than the desire of his readers, which com- 
pels Mr, Punch, when the squire, the colonel, and the admiral 
are to he at once expressed, together with all that they 
legislate or fight for, in the symbolic figure of the nation, to 
present the incarnate Mr. Bull always as a farmer — never as 
a manufacturer or shopkeeper? " Such a view on the part 
of Mr. Ruskin is consistent with his life-long insistence upon 
literal truth in art. But he was obviously mistaken when he 
questioned that John Bull is the deliberate choice of the 
British public. The average Englishman, whether soldier or 
sailor, statesman, merchant, or manufacturer, approves and 
enjoys the pleasant fiction that the representative type is a 
good, old-fashioned country gentleman, conservative and 
rather insular, a supporter of landed interests, a patron of 
country sports; in short, one who lives his life close to his 
native soil, who seems to personify the rolling down, the 
close-clipped hedge, the trim gardenplot, the neat thatched 
roof, things which typify England the world over. 

Not only are most of the accepted symbolic figures — John 
Bull, Uncle Sam, and the rest — what they are because they 
meet with popular approval, but no cartoonist to-day could 
venture upon any radical departure from the established 
type — a bearded John Bull, a smooth-shaven Uncle Sam — 
without calling down public disfavor upon his head. If one 
stops to think of it, our own accepted national type, the tall, 
lank, awkward figure, the thin, angular Yankee face with a 
shrewd and kindly twinkle in the eye, is even less representa- 
tive of the average American than John Bull is of the average 
Briton. It is interesting to recall that before the Civil War 



1 18 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

our national type frequently took the form of a Southerner — 
regularly in the pages of Punch. To-day, in England and in 
America, there is but one type of Uncle Sam, and we would 
not tolerate a change. It may be that in the gaunt, loose-knit 
frame, the strong and rugged features we recognize a kinship 
to that sterling and essentially American type of man which 
found its best exponent in Lincoln, and that this is the reason 
why Uncle Sam has become the most universally accepted and 
the best beloved of all our conventional types. 



CHAPTER XIV 

'48 AND THE COUP D'ETAT 

IT was only natural that caricature, like every other form 
of free expression of opinion, should feel the conse- 
quences of the general political upheaval of 1848; and 
these consequences differed widely in the different countries 
of Europe, according to the degree of civic liberty which that 
revolutionary movement had effected. In Germany, for 
example, it resulted in the establishment of a whole group 
of comic weeklies, with a license for touching upon political 
topics quite unprecedented in that land of imperialism and 
censorship. In France, on the contrary, political caricature 
came to an abrupt close just at a time when it had begun to 
give promise of exceptional interest. Louis Napoleon, who 
owed his elevation to the presidency of the republic chiefly 
to the popular belief in his absolute harmlessness, developed 
a most unexpected and disconcerting strength of character. 
His capacity for cunning and unscrupulousness was yet to be 
learned; but a feeling of distrust was already in the air, and 
the caricaturists were quick to reflect it. Louis Napoleon, 
however, was keenly alive to the deadly harm wrought to his 
predecessor by Philipon's pictorial sharp-shooters, and he did 
not propose to let history repeat itself by holding him up to 
public ridicule, after the fashion of the poor old " Poire," 
the citizen king. Accordingly the coup d'etat was hardly an 
accomplished fact when press laws were passed of such a 
stringent nature that the public press, and pictorial satire 
along with it, was reduced to a state of vassalage, dependent 

119 



120 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



upon the imperial caprice, a condition that lasted upward of 
fifteen vears. Consequently, the few cartoons satirizing 
Napoleon III., that emanate from French sources, either be- 
long to the closing years of his reign or else antedate the law 
of 185 i, which denied trial by jury to all cases of infringe- 
ment of the press laws. The latter cartoons, however, are of 
special interest, for they serve to throw important light upon 
the popular state of mind just prior to the famous coup d'etat. 
The majority of these cartoons appeared in the pages of 
Charivari, and some of the best are due to the caustic pencil 







hi 
i 










" THE ONLY LAMPS AUTHORIZED TO LIGHT THE 

PATH OF THE GOVERNMENT " 

By Vernier in " Charivari." 

of Charles Vernier. A good specimen of this artist's work 
is a lithograph entitled " The Only Lamps Authorized for 
the Present to Light up the Path of the Government," show- 
ing Louis Napoleon marching along sedately, his hands 
clasped behind his back and his way illuminated by three 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



121 



lantern-bearers. The lanterns are, respectively, La Patrie 
dn Soir, Le Moniteur du Soir and La Gazette de France, 
newspapers then in favor with the government. Just in front 
of Louis Napoleon, however, may be seen a dark and 
ominous manhole. Another of Vernier's cartoons is called 




AN ITALIAN CARTUON OF '48. 

" The Shooting Match in the Champs Elysees." The target 
is the head of the Constitution surmounting a pole. Napo- 
leon is directing the efforts of the contestants. " The man 
who knocks the target over completely," he is saying, " I will 
make my Prime Minister." The contrast between the great 
Napoleon and the man whom Victor Hugo liked so to call 
" Napoleon the Little " suggested another pictorial effort of 
Vernier. A veteran of the Grand Army is watching the 
coach of the state passing by, Napoleon holding the reins. 
" What! That my Emperor! " exclaims the veteran, shad- 
ing his eyes. " Those rascally Englishmen, how they have 
changed my vision! " The methods by which Louis Napo- 
leon obtained his election first as President for ten years, and 
secondly as Emperor of the French, were satirized in Chari- 
vari by Daumier in a cartoon called " Les Aveugles " (The 
Blind). In the center of this cartoon is a huge ballot jar 



122 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

Around this the sightless 



marked " Universal Suffrage, 
voters are laboriously groping. 

Many were the designs by which Daumier in Charivari 
satirized Eouis Napoleon's flirtation with the French republic. 
In one of them the Prince, bearing a remote resemblance in 
manner and in dress to Robert Macaire, is offering the lady 
his arm. " Belle dame" he is saying, " will you accept my 
escort?" To which she replies coldly: "Monsieur, your 




NAPOLEON LE PETIT. 

By Vernier. 

passion is entirely too sudden. I can place no great faith 
in it. 

Pictorial expressions of opinion regarding the " great 
crime " of 185 1, which once more replaced a republic with an 
empire, must be sought for outside of France. But there 
was one subject at this time upon which even the strictest of 
edicts could not enforce silence, and that was the subject of 
Napoleon's marriage to Eugenie. The Emperor's Spanish 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



123 



bride was never popular, not even during the first years of the 
Second Empire, before she began to meddle with affairs of 
state; and in many incisive ways the Parisians heaped ridicule 
upon her. A curious little pamphlet, with text and illustra- 
tions, about the new Empress was sold in Paris at the time of 
the marriage. This pamphlet was entirely complimentary 
and harmless. The biting humor of it was on the title-page, 
which the vendors went about crying in the streets: "The 




portrait and virtues of the Empress, all for two sous ! " But 
for a frank expression of what the world thought of the new 
master of the destinies of France, it is necessary to turn to the 
contemporary pages of Punch. The " London Charivari " 
was at this time just entering upon its most glorious epoch of 
political caricature. John Leech, one of the two great 
English cartoonists of the past half century, had arrived at 
the maturity of his talent; the second, John Tenniel, was 
destined soon to join the staff of Punch in place of Richard 
Doyle, who resigned in protest against the editorial policy of 
attacking the Roman Catholic Church. Both of these artists 
possessed a technical skill and a degree of artistic inspiration 
that raised them far above the level of the mere caricaturist. 



124 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



And as it happened, the world was entering upon a long 
succession of stormy scenes, destined to furnish them with 
matter worthy of their pencils. After forty years of peace, 




LOUIS NAPOLEON AND MADAME FRANCE. 



Europe was about to incur an epidemic of war. The clash 
between Turkey and Russia in 1853 was destined to assume 
international proportions in the Crimean War; England's 
troubles were to be augmented by the revolt of her Indian 
mercenaries; the Russian war was to be closely followed by 
another between France and Austria; by the enfranchisement 
of Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic; the bitter struggle 
between Prussia and Austria ; and the breaking up of the 
Confederation of the Rhine, with the Franco-Prussian War 
looming up in the near future. It was on the threshold of 
such troublous times, and as if prophetic of the end of 
European tranquillity, that Leech signalized the accession of 
Napoleon III. as Emperor with the significant cartoon, 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



125 



"France is Tranquil! ! !" Poor France cannot well be 
otherwise than tranquil, for Mr. Leech depicts her bound 
hand and foot, a chain-shot fastened to her feet and a sentry 
standing guard over her with a bayonet. The artist soon 
followed this up with another cartoon, evidently suggested 
by the initial plate of Hogarth's famous series of " The 
Rake's Progress." The Prince President, in the character of 
the Rake, has just come into his inheritance, and has cast aside 



PROCLAMATION AU PEUPLEFRANCAIS » GILL 




LOUIS NAPOLEONS PROCLAMATION. 
By Gill. 

his former mistress, Liberte, to whom he is offering money, 
her mother (France) standing by, an indignant witness to the 
scene. His military tailor is measuring him for a new 
imperial uniform, while behind him a priest (in allusion to the 



126 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



financial aid which the Papal party was receiving from 
Napoleon) is helping himself from a plate of money standing 
beside the President. On the floor is a confused litter of 
swords, knapsacks, bayonets, crowns, crosses of the Legion of 




SPLIT CROW IN THE CRIMEA. 

From Punch. 



Honor, the Code Napoleon, and other miscellaneous remind- 
ers of Louis' well-known craze on the subject of his uncle 
and his uncle's ideas. Mr. Tenniel's early cartoons of Louis 
Napoleon are scarcely more kindly. The Emperor's ap- 
proaching marriage is hit off in one entitled " The Eagle in 
Love," in which Eugenie, represented with the most unflatter- 
ing likeness, is employed in paring the imperial eagle's talons. 
In 1853 Tenniel depicts an "International Poultry Show," 
where we see among the entries a variety of eagles — the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 127 

Prussian eagle, the American eagle, the two-headed Russian 
and Austrian eagles — and among them a wretched mongrel, 
more closely akin to a bedraggled barn-door fowl than to the 
"French Eagle" which it claims to be. Queen Victoria, 
who is visiting the show, under escort of Mr. Punch, remarks : 
" We have nothing of that sort, Mr. Punch; but should there 
be a lion show, we can send a specimen ! ! " 



CHAPTER XV 

THE STRUGGLE IN THE CRIMEA 

THE grim struggle of the Crimean War for a time 
checked Mr. Punch's attacks upon Napoleon III., 
and turned his attention in another direction. 
Although the war cloud in the East was assuming portentous 
dimensions, there were many in England, the Peace Society, 
the members of the peace-at-any-price party, with Messrs. 
Bright and Cobden at their head, and most conspicuous of all 
the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, who deliberately blinded 
themselves to the possibility of war. It was for the enlighten- 
ment of these gentlemen that Mr. Leech designed his cartoon 
" No Danger," representing a donkey, eloquent in his stolid 
stupidity, tranquilly braying in front of a loaded cannon. In 
still another cartoon Lord Aberdeen himself is placidly smok- 
ing " The Pipe of Peace " over a brimming barrel of gun- 
powder. John Bull, however, has already become wide- 
awake to the danger, for he is nailing the Russian eagle to his 
barn door, remarking to his French neighbor that he won't 
worry the Turkies any more. At this time England had 
begun to watch with growing jealousy the cordial entente 
between Russia and Austria, for the Emperor Nicholas was 
strongly suspected of having offered to Austria a slice of his 
prospective prize, Turkey. This rumor forms the basis of 
an effective cartoon by Leech, " The Old 'Un and the Young 
'Un," in which the Russian and Austrian Emperors are seated 
at table, genially dividing a bottle of port between them. 
" Now then, Austria," says Nicholas, " just help me finish 

128 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 129 

the Port(e)." Meanwhile, hostilities between Turkey and 
Russia had begun, and the latter had already received a 
serious setback at Oltenitza, an event commemorated by Ten- 
niel in his cartoon of " A Bear with a Sore Head." In spite 
of his blind optimism, Lord Aberdeen was by this time finding 
it decidedly difficult to handle the reins of foreign affairs. 
One of the best satires of the year is by Tenniel, entitled 
" The Unpopular Act of the Courier of St. Petersburg," de- 
picting Aberdeen performing the dangerous feat of driving 
a team of vicious horses. The mettlesome leaders, Russia 
and Turkey, have already taken the bit between their teeth, 
while Austria, catching the contagion of their viciousness, is 
plunging dangerously. This cartoon was soon followed by 
another still more notable, entitled " What It Has Come 
To," one of those splendid animal pictures in which John 
Tenniel especially excelled. It shows us the Russian bear, 
scampering off in the distance, while in the foreground Lord 
Aberdeen is clinging desperately to the British lion, which has 
started in mad pursuit, with his mane erect and his tail 
stiffened like a ramrod; the lion plunges along, dragging 
behind him the terrified premier, who is gasping out that he 
can ho longer hold him and is forced to " let him go." At 
the same time Mr. Leech also represented pictorially Lord 
Aberdeen awakening to the necessity of war in his " Bom- 
bardment of Odessa." The cartoon is in two parts, 
representing respectively the English Premier and the Rus- 
sian Emperor reading their morning paper. " Bombardment 
of Odessa," says Aberdeen. " Dear me, this will be very 
disagreeable to my imperial friend." " Bombardment of 
Odessa," says Nicholas; "confound it! This will be very 
annoying to dear old Aberdeen ! " In the following Novem- 
ber the British victory of Inkerman, won against almost 



no 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



hopeless odds, was witnessed by two members of the Russian 
imperial family. Leech promptly commemorated this fact 
in his picture of " The Russian Bear's Licked Cubs, Nicholas 
and Michael." The cartoon entitled the " Bursting of the 
Russian Bubble " appeared in Punch, October 14, 1854, just 




after the battle of the Alma had taken place and part of the 
Russian fleet had been destroyed by the English and French 
ships at Sebastopol. This cartoon is by the hand of Leech. 
The Russian Emperor, Nicholas I., had boasted of the 
" irresistible power " which was to enable him to overthrow 
the allied forces gathered in the Crimea, and here the artist 
shows very graphically the shattering of this " irresistible 
power " and of the " unlimited means." Of all the cartoons 
which Leech produced there is none which enjoys a more 
enduring fame than the one entitled " General Fevrier 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



131 



Turned Traitor." Certainly no other in the whole series of 
Crimean War cartoons appearing in Punch compares with it 
in power. Yet splendid and effective as it is, there is in it a 
cruelty worthy of Grandville or Gillray, and when it appeared 




"GENERAL FEVRIER" TURNED. TRAITOR. 



1 Russia oas Two Genebals 1 



1 contide— Gewerals JaCTIEB and FEVaiEB."— Speech of the late Emperor of Rama 



t caused a shudder to run through all England. The Rus- 
sian Emperor had boasted in a speech on the subject of the 
Crimean War that, whatever forces France and England 
might be able to send to the front, Russia possessed two 
generals on whom she could always rely, General Janvier and 



i 3 2 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

General Fevrier. In other words, Nicholas I. cynically 
alluded to the hardship of the Russian winter, on which he 
counted to reduce greatly by death the armies of the Allies in 
the Crimea. But toward the end of the winter, the Emperor 
himself died of pulmonary apoplexy, after an attack, of in- 
fluenza. In a flash, Leech seized upon the idea. General 
Fevrier had turned traitor. Under this title, the cartoon was 
published by Punch in its issue of March 10, 1855. General 
Fevrier (Death in the uniform of a Russian general) is plac- 
ing his deadly hand on the breast of Nicholas, and the icy cold 
of the Russian winter — the ally in whom the Emperor had 
placed his trust — has recoiled upon himself. The tragic 
dignity and grim significance of this cartoon made a deep 
impression upon Ruskin, who regarded it as representing in 
the art of caricature what Hood's " Song of the Shirt " 
represents in poetry. " The reception of the last-named 
woodcut," he says, " was in several respects a curious test of 
modern feeling. . . There are some points to be regretted in 
the execution of the design, but the thought was a grand one; 
the memory of the word spoken and of its answer could hardly 
in any more impressive way have been recorded for the 
people; and I believe that to all persons accustomed to the 
earnest forms of art it contained a profound and touching 
lesson. The notable thing was, however, that it offended 
persons not in earnest, and was loudly cried out against by the 
polite journalism of Society. This fate is, I believe, the 
almost inevitable one of thoroughly genuine work in these 
days, whether poetry or painting; but what added to the 
singularity in this case was that coarse heartlessness was even 
more offended than polite heartlessness." 

As was but natural, the Anglo-French alliance against 
Russia is alluded to in more than one of Mr. Punch's Crimean 




HENRI ROCIIEFORT AND HIS LANTERN. 



134 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



War cartoons. One of the earliest is a drawing by Tenniel 
of England and France typified by two fine specimens ot 
Guards of both nations standing back to back in friendly 
rivalry of height, and Mr. Spielmann records in his " History 
of Punch " that the cut proved so popular that under its title 
of " The United Service: " it was reproduced broadcast on 
many articles of current use and even served as a decoration 
for the backs of playing cards. Still another cartoon, 
entitled " The Split Crow in the Crimea," represents England 
and France as two huntsmen, hard on the track of a wounded 
and fleeing two-headed bird ! " He's hit hard ! — follow him 
up ! " exclaimed the huntsmen. In a French reproduction of 
this cartoon, which is to be found in Armand Dayot's " Le 
Second Empire," " Crow " is amusingly translated as cou- 
ronne (crown), and the publishers of Punch are given as 




BROTHERS IN ARMS. THR FRENCH AND ENGLISH 
TROOPS IN THE CRIMEA. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 135 

" MM. Breadburg, Agnew, et Cie." Another cartoon of the 
same period is called "Brothers in Arms." It shows a British 
soldier carrying on his back a wounded French soldier, and a 
French soldier carrying on his back a wounded Englishman. 
The two wounded men are clasping hands. There is no 
better evidence of the utter dearth of French caricature at 
this period than the fact that M. Dayot, whose indefatigable 
research has brought together a highly interesting collection 
of pictorial documents of all classes upon this period of 
French history, could find nothing in the way of a cartoon 
in his own country and was forced to borrow from Punch 
the few that he reproduces. 

On the other side the Russian cartoonists were by no means 
backward in recording the events of the war and holding up 
the efforts of the Allies to pictorial derision. The Russian 
point of view has come down to us in a series of excellent 
prints published in St. Petersburg during the months of the 
conflict. In this warfare the Russians may be said to have 
borrowed from their enemies, for this series is essentially 
French in method and execution. All through this series 
England and France are shown buffeted about from pillar to 
post by the Conquering Bear. A description of one of these 
cartoons will give a fair general idea of the entire series. 
Sir Charles Napier, at a dinner given in his honor in London 
just before the departure of the Allied fleet for Kronstadt, 
has made the foolish boast that he would soon invite his 
hosts to dine with him in St. Petersburg. Of course the fleet 
never reached St. Petersburg, and the Russian artist satir- 
ically summed up the situation by depicting Sir Charles at the 
top of the mast, endeavoring by the aid of a large spy-glass 
to catch a sight of the Czar's capital. 

Among the crude American lithographs of this period the 




o K 



5 <s 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 137 

Crimean War was not forgotten. A rather rare cartoon, 
entitled " Turkey, John Bull and M. Frog-Eater in a Bad 
Fix," is especially interesting as an evidence that American 
sympathy during the war was in a measure on the Russian 
side. The Russian General Menshikoff is standing on the 
heights of Sebastopol looking down smilingly and serenely 
on the discomfited allies, saying: " How do you do, gentle- 
men? Very happy to see you. You must be tired. Won't 
you walk in and take something?" John Bull, seriously 
wounded, is lying prostrate, bawling out: "Come, come, 
Turk, no dodging. Hulloa there ! Is that the way you stick 
to your friends? The coat of my stomach is ruined, my 
wind nearly gone. I won't be able to blow for a month. 
Pull me out of this at any price ! The devil take one party 
and his dam the other. I am getting sick of this business." 
By his side is the figure of a Frenchman just hit by a cannon- 
ball from one of the Russian guns, and crying out: " O ! By 
damn ! I not like such treat. I come tousand mile and 
spend ver much money to take someting from wid you, and 
you treat me as I vas van Villin ! Scoundrel ! Rob- 
bare ! ! " 

In closing the subject of the Crimean War, it is worth 
while to call attention to one curious phase of the war as 
contained in the programme of a theatrical entertainment 
given by the French soldiers in the trenches of Sebastopol, 
December 23, 1855. The programme is headed "The 
Little Comic Review of the Crimea." It contains the an- 
nouncement of the Tchernaia Theater, which four days later 
is to present three dramatic pieces. The drawing is by 
Lucien Salmont. 

One final echo of the struggle in the Crimea is found in 
another of Tenniel's graphic animal pictures, " The British 



\ t&fc- V\«^«i»^ eoTK^u*' "4./ Cu*~i_, n'c en I i-^jC.z- 




Tfl'Sifc TCtfEJUVAlA . 














^ v^wiAruvno^uiy 




•>xc<^fy 






PROGRAMME OF A THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE GIVEN BY THE FRENCH 
SOLDIERS IN THE TRENCHES BEFORE SEBASTOPOL. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



•39 



Lion Smells a Rat," which depicts an angry lion sniffing 
suspiciously at the crack of a door, behind which is being held 
the conference which followed the fall of Sebastopol. But 
by far the most famous instance of Tenniel's work is his 
series of Cawnpore cartoons, the series bearing upon the 
Indian mutiny of 1857; an d one of the finest, if not the very 
finest, of them all is that entitled " The British Lion's Venge- 
ance on the Bengal Tiger." It represents in the life work of 
Tennielwhat" General Fevrier Turned Traitor" stands for 
in the life work of John Leech. The subject was suggested 
to Tenniel by Shirley Brooks. It summed up all the horror 
and thirst for revenge which animated England when the 
news came of the treacherous atrocities of the Sepoy rebels. 
The Cawnpore massacre of women and children ordered by 
the infamous Nana Sahib had taken place in June, and when 
this cartoon appeared in Punch, August 22, 1857, England 
had just sent thirty thousand troops to India. In the picture 
the British lion is springing at the throat of the Bengal tiger, 



</ 




THE BRITISH LION'S VENGEANCE ON THE BENGAL TIGEE. 



HO CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

which is standing over the prostrate bodies of a woman and 
a child. The tiger, fearful of being robbed of its prey, is 
snarling at the avenging lion. Another of the famous Cawn- 
pore cartoons of Tenniel is descriptive of British vengeance 
on the Sepoy mutineers. The English troops were simply 
wild for revenge when the stories came to them of the 
atrocities which had been perpetrated on English women and 
children, and their vengeance knew no bounds. The Sepoys 
were blown from the mouths of the English cannon. It was 
the custom of the English soldiers to pile up a heap of 
Sepoys, dead or wounded, pour oil over them, and then set 
fire to the pile. The Tenniel cartoon, entitled " Justice," 
published September 12, 1857, shows the figure of Justice 
with sword and shield cutting down the mutineers, while be- 
hind her are the British troops working destruction with their 
bayonets. 

No sooner had the English-French alliance against Russia 
come to an end than Punch once more began to give expres- 
sion to his disapproval of Napoleon. A hostile spirit toward 
Frenchmen was ingrained in the very nature of John Leech, 
and he vented it freely in such cartoons as his celebrated 
" Cock-a-doodle-doo ! " in which the French cock, clad in the 
uniform of a colonel, is crowing lustily over the results of a 
war of which Great Britain had borne the brunt. Or again, 
in " Some Foreign Produce that Mr. Bull can very well 
Spare," a cut which includes French conspirators, vile French- 
women, organ-grinders (Mr. Leech was abnormally sensi- 
tive to street noises), and other objectionable foreign refuse. 
It is interesting in this connection to note that Leech's hostility 
to Louis Napoleon was the direct cause of Thackeray's resig- 
nation from the staff of Punch in the winter of 1854. In the 
letter written in the following March, Thackeray explains 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



141 



that he had had some serious differences regarding the edi- 
torial policy of Punch, and more specifically about the abuse of 
Louis Napoleon which, he says, " I think and thought was 
writing unjustly at that time, and dangerously for the welfare 
and peace of the country;" and he then adds the specific in- 
stance which prompted him to sever his connections : " Com- 
ing from Edinburgh, I bought a Punch containing a picture of 
a beggar on horseback, in which the emperor was represented 
galloping to hell with a sword reeking with blood. As soon 
as ever I could, after my return, I went to Bouverie Street 
and gave in my resignation." Thackeray's act had no influ- 
ence upon the policy of Punch. Leech's cartoons grew steadily 
more incisive in character. One of the most extraordinary is 
that known as " The French Porcupine." It represents 




THE FRENCH PORCUPINE. 

He ma> be en Inoffcn3ive Animal, but he Don't Look like it 



Napoleon III. as a porcupine, bristling with French bayonets 
in place of quills. One of Napoleon's favorite sayings was 
" U Empire c'est la paix." But this saying was very often 
contradicted by events, and the first ten years of his occupa- 
tion of the French throne showed France embroiled in the 
Crimean War and the war with Austria. In preparation for 
the latter conflict a large increase was being made in the 



142 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

French military armament; and Leech seized upon the em- 
peror's dictum only to express his skepticism. The cartoon 
appeared in March, 1859. As a matter of fact, the idea 
in this cartoon had previously been used in another called 
' The Puppet Show," published in June, 1854, depicting the 
Czar Nicholas in a manner closely similar; yet Mr. Spiel- 
mann, who notes this fact, adds that Mr. Leech had probably 
never seen, or else had forgotten, the earlier caricature. This 
" French Porcupine " is cited as an instance of Leech's ex- 
traordinary speed in executing a cartoon directly upon the 
wooden block. The regular Punch dinner had that week 
been held a day late. " Every moment was precious, and 
Leech proposed the idea for the cartoon, drew it in two hours, 
and caught his midday train on the following day, speeding 
away into the country with John Tenniel for their usual Sat- 
urday hunt." It was during this same year, 1859, at the 
close of the war which humbled Austria and forced her to 
surrender Venetia to Sardinia, that Leech voiced the suspicion 
that Louis was casting longing eyes upon Italian territory in a 
cartoon entitled " A Scene from the New Pantomime." Na- 
poleon III. here figures as a clown, a revolver in his hand, a 
goose labeled Italy protruding from his capacious pocket. 
He is earnestly assuring Britannia, represented as a stout, 
elderly woman, eying him suspiciously, that his intentions 
are strictly honorable. 



PART III 

THE CIVIL AND FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WARS 
CHAPTER XVI 

THE MEXICAN WAR AND SLAVERY 

IN this country the political cartoon, which practically 
began with William Charles's parodies upon Gillray, 
developed in a fitful and spasmodic fashion until about 
the middle of the century. Their basis was the Gillray 
group of many figures, and they had also much of the Gill- 
ray coarseness and indecency, with a minimum of artistic 
skill. They were mostly lithographs of the crudest sort, 
designed to pass from hand to hand, or to be tacked up on 
the wall. It was not until the first administration of Andrew 
Jackson that a school of distinctly American political cari- 
cature can be said to have existed. It was in 1848 that the 
firm of Currier & Ives, with an office in Nassau Street, in 
New York City, began the publication of a series of cam- 
paign caricatures of sufficient merit to have been a serious 
factor in influencing public opinion. Crude as they are, 
these lithographs are exceedingly interesting to study in de- 
tail. They tell their story very plainly, even apart from the 
legends inclosed in the huge balloon-like loops issuing from 
the lips of each member of the group — loops that suggest a 
grotesque resemblance to a soap-bubble party on a large 
scnle. There is an amusing stiffness about the figures. They 
stand in such painfully precise attitudes that at a little dis- 

143 




NEW EDITION OF MACBETH — BANK-OH'S GHOST ! 1837. 

One of the caricatures inspired by the United States Bank Case. 
From the collection of the Neio Yo?-k Pubic Library. 




BALAAM AND BALAAM S ASS. 

One of the caricatures inspired by the United States Bank Case. 
From the collection of the New York Public Library. 




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tance they might readily be mistaken for some antiquated 
fashion plates. The faces, however, are in most cases excel- 
lent likenesses; they are neither distorted nor exaggerated. 
The artists, while sadly behind the times in retaining the use 
of the loop which Continental cartoonists discarded much ^ 
earlier, were in other respects quite up-to-date, especially in 
adopting the method of the elder Doyle, whose great con- 
tribution to caricature was that of drawing absolutely faithful 
likenesses of the statesmen he wished to ridicule, relying for 
the humor of the cartoon upon the situation in which he placed 
them. It was only natural that the events of the Mexican 
War should have inspired a number of cartoons. One of 
these is entitled "Uncle Sam's Taylorifics," and shows a 
complacent Yankee coolly snipping a Mexican in two with a 
huge pair of shears. One blade bears the inscription " Vol- 
unteers," and the other " General Taylor." The Yankee's 
left arm is labeled " Eastern States," the tail of his coat 
" Oregon," his belt " Union," his left leg " Western States," 
and his right leg, which he is using vigorously on the Mexi- 
can, " Southern States," and the boot " Texas." Below the 
discomfited Mexican yawns the Rio Grande. Behind the 
Yankee's back John Bull — a John Bull of the type introduced 
by William Charles during the War of 1812 — is looking on 
enviously. 

American national feeling on the subject of the European 
Powers deriving benefit from the discovery of gold in Cali- 
fornia is illustrated by a cartoon which shows the United 
States ready to defend her possessions by force of arms. The 
various Powers have crossed the sea and are very near to our 
coast. Queen Victoria, mounted on a bull, is in the lead. 
She is saying: "Oh, dear Albert, don't you cry for me. 
I'm off for California with my shovel on my knee." Behind 




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152 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

her is the figure of Russia, saying: " As something is Bruin, 
I'll put in my paw, while the nations around me are making a 
Jaw." Louis Napoleon, who at the time had just been 
elected President of the French, is drawn in the form of a 
bird. He is flying over the heads of Victoria and Russia, and 
singing: " As you have gold for all creation, den please give 
some to La Grand Nation. I have just become de President, 
and back I shall not like to went." In the distance may be 
seen Spain, and beyond the United States fleet. Along the 
shore stretch the tents of an American army. Ominously 
coiled up on the rocks is the American rattlesnake with the 
head of President Taylor. Back of the camp is a battery of 
American guns directed by the American eagle, which wears 
the head of General Scott, saying: " Retreat, you poor 

d s ! Nor a squabble engender, for our Gold unto you 

we will never surrender. Right about face ! Double quick 
to the rear! And back to your keepers all hands of you 
steer." 

The Presidential election of 1852 was cartooned under the 
title " Great Foot Race for the Presidential Purse ($100,- 
000 and Pickings) Over the Union Course, 1852." The 
Whigs, encouraged by their success with General Taylor, put 
forth another military officer, General Scott, as their candi- 
date, but in this cartoon Daniel Webster is shown to be well 
in the lead and receiving the plaudits of most of the specta- 
tors. Behind him is Scott, and a little way back is Franklin 
Pierce, who proved the ultimate winner. " I can beat you 
both, and walk in at that, although you had a hundred yards 
the start of me," is Webster's conviction. " Confound Web- 
ster! " cries Scott. " What does he want to get right in my 
way for? If he don't give out, or Pierce don't faint, I shall 
be beaten." " No, no, old Fuss and Feathers," retorts 




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From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 




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156 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

Pierce, " you don't catch this child fainting now. I am going 
to make good time ! Whether I win or not, Legs, do your 
duty." 

Caricature dealing with the Presidential campaign of 1856 
is represented by the cartoon called " The Presidential 
Campaign of '56." Buchanan, who proved the successful 
candidate, is mounted on a hideous monster resembling a 
snake, and marked " Slavery." The monster is being 
wheeled along on a low, flat car drawn by Pierce, Douglas, 
and Cass. A star bearing the word " Kansas " is about to 
disappear down the monster's throat. In the distance Fre- 
mont, on horseback, is calling out: " Hold on! Take that 
animal back! We don't want it this side of the fence." 
Buchanan is saying, " Pull down that fence and make way for 
the Peculiar Institution." The fence in question is the 
Mason and Dixon's line. The faces of Cass, Douglas, and 
Pierce, who are drawing along the monster, are obliterated — 
they are absolutely formless. 

The evils of slavery from a Northern point of view are 
shown in a cartoon called " No Higher Law." King Slavery 
is seated on his throne holding aloft a lash and a chain. 
Under his left elbow is the Fugitive Slave Bill, resting on 
three human skulls. Daniel Webster stands beside the 
throne, holding in his hand the scroll on which is printed, " I 
propose to support that bill to the fullest extent — to the 
fullest extent." A runaway slave is fighting off the blood- 
hounds that are worrying him, and in the distance, on a hill, 
the figure of Liberty is toppling from her pedestal. 

The cartoon " Practical Illustration of the Fugitive Slave 
Law " sums up very completely Abolitionist sentiment on the 
subject. The slaveholder, with a noose in one hand and a 
chain in the other, a cigar in his mouth and his top-hat 






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THE CREAT DISUNION SERPENT, 



From the coffection of the New York Historical Society. 

decorated with the single star, which was the sign of the 
Southern Confederacy, is astride of the back of Daniel Web- 
ster, who is crawling on all-fours. In Webster's left hand 
is the Constitution. " Don't back out, Webster," says the 
s-laveholder. " If you do, we're ruined." The slave-woman 
who is being pursued has taken refuge with William Lloyd 
Garrison, of the Boston Liberator, who is saying: " Don't 
be alarmed, Susanna, you're safe enough." One of Garri- 
son's arms is encircling the negress's waist, at the end of the 
other is a pistol. In the back of the picture is the Temple of 
Liberty, over which two flags are flying. On one flag we 
read: "All men are born free and equal;" on the other, 
" A day, an hour, of virtuous Liberty is worth an Age of 
servitude." 






CHAPTER XVII 

NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES 

DOWN to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 
I the history of American political caricature is a 
history of lost opportunities. Revolution and 
war have always been the great harvest times of the car- 
toonist. Gillray and Rowlandson owe their fame to the 
Napoleonic wars; Philipon and Daumier, to the overthrow 
of Louis Philippe; Leech and Tenniel reached their zenith in 
the days of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny. It is 
not the election cartoon, or the tariff cartoon, or the cartoon 
of local politics, it is the war cartoon that is most widely 
hailed and longest remembered. Yet of all the wars in 
which the United States has been engaged, not one has given 
birth to a great satiric genius, and none but the latest, our 
recent war with Spain, has received comprehensive treatment 
in the form of caricature. It is not strange that the Revolu- 
tionary War and that of 1812 failed to inspire any worthier 
efforts than William Charles's crude imitations of Gillray. 
The mechanical processes of printing and engraving, the 
methods of distribution, the standards of public taste, were 
all still too primitive. The Mexican War was commem- 
orated in a number of the popular lithographs of the day; 
but it was not a prolonged struggle, nor one calculated to stir 
the public mind profoundly. With the Civil War the case 
was radically different. Here was a struggle which 
threatened not only national honor, but national existence — a 
struggle which prolonged itself grimly, month after month, 

159 



i6o CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

and was borne home to a great majority of American families 
with the force of personal tragedy, arraying friend against 
frieiid, and father against son, and offering no brighter hope 
for the future than the vista of a steadily lengthening death- 
roll. There was never a time in the history of the nation 
when the public mind, from one end of the country to the 
other, was in such a state of tension; never, since the days of 
Napoleon, had there been such an opportunity for a real 
master of satiric art. It seems amazing, as one looks back 







£§§t&^ : 



ROUGH AND READY LOCOMOTIVE AGAINST THE FIELD. 

From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 

over the pictorial records of these four years, that the magni- 
tude of the events did not galvanize into activity some un- 
known genius of the pencil, and found then and there a new 
school of American caricature commensurate with the fever- 
heat of public sentiment. The existing school of caricature 
seems to have been absurdly inadequate. The prevailing 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 161 

types were a sort of fashion-plate lithograph — groups of 
public men in mildly humorous situations, their features fL.~d 
in the solemn repose of the daguerreotypes upon which they 
were probably modeled; or else the conventional election 
steeplechase, in which the contestants, with long, balloon-like 
loops trailing from their mouths, suggest an absurd semblance 
to the cowboys of a Wild West show, all engaged in a vain 
attempt to lasso and pull in their own idle words. Many of 
the cartoons actually issued at the outbreak of the Civil War 
impress one with a sense of indecorum, of ill-timed levity. 
What was wanted was not the ineptitude of feeble humor, 
but the rancor and venom of a Gillray, the stinging irony of a 
Daumier, the grim dignity of a Tenniel. And it was not 
forthcoming. The one living American who might have 
produced work of a high order was Thomas Nast; but 
although Nast's pencil was dedicated to the cause of the 
Union from the beginning to the end, in the series of power- 
ful emblematic pictures that appeared in Harper s Weekly, 
his work as a caricaturist did not begin until the close of the 
war. 

It is interesting to conjecture what the great masters of 
caricature would have made of such an opportunity. The 
issues of the war were so clear-cut, their ethical significance so 
momentous, that an American Gillray, a Unionist Gillray, 
would have found material for a series of cartoons of 
eloquent and grewsome power. It is easy to imagine what 
form they would have taken : an Uncle Sam, writhing in 
.agony, his limbs shackled with the chains of slavery, his lips 
gagged with the Fugitive Slave Law, slowly being sawn 
asunder, while Abolition and Secession guide the opposite 
ends of the saw, or else the American Eagle being worried 
and torn limb from limb by Southern bloodhounds and stung 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 163 

by copperheads, while the British Lion and the rest of the 
European menagerie look on, wistfully licking their chops 
and with difficulty restraining themselves from participating 
in the feast. Such a cartoonist would have found a mine of 
suggestion in " Uncle Tom's Cabin " ; he would have crowded 
his plates with Legrees and Topsies, Uncle Toms and Sambos 
and Quimbos, fearful and wonderful to look upon, brutal, 
distorted, and unforgettable. 

It is equally easy to imagine what a Daumier might have 
done with the material afforded by the Civil War. Some 
types of faces seem to defy the best efforts of the caricaturist 
— smooth, regular-featured faces, like that of Lord Rosebery, 
over which the pencil of satire seems to slip without leaving 
any effective mark. Other faces, strong, rugged, salient, 
seem to invite the caricaturist's efforts; and these were the 
types that predominated among the leaders of the struggle 
for the Union. Daumier's genius lay in his ability to carica- 
ture the human face, to seize upon a minimum of lines and 
points, to catch some absurd semblance to an inanimate object, 
some symbolic suggestion. And when once found, he would 
harp upon it, ringing all possible changes, keeping it in- 
sistently, mercilessly before the public. One can fancy with 
what avidity he would have seized upon the stolid, indomit- 
able figure of Grant, intrenched behind his big, black, ubiq- 
uitous cigar. That cigar would have become the center of 
interest, the portentous symbol of Grant's dogged, taciturn 
persistence. Gradually that cigar would have grown and 
grown, its thickening smoke spreading in a dense war cloud 
over the whole series of cartoons, until finally it became the 
black, shining muzzle of a cannon, belching forth the powder 
and fire and ammunition that was to decide the issue of the 
war. What Tenniel would have done is evidenced by what 




nast's famous cartoon "peace." 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 165 

he actually did in Punch. The great tragedies of those four 
years, Gettysburg and Bull Run and the Battle of the Wilder- 
ness, would have been pictured with the tragic dignity that 
stamps his famous cartoon in which he commemorated the 
assassination of Lincoln. 



CHAPTER XVIII 



THE SOUTH SECEDES 



IN view of what might have been done, it Is somewhat 
exasperating to look over the actual cartoons of the 
war as they have come down to us. Even when a 
clever idea was evolved none seemed to have the cleverness or 
the enterprise to develop it. As all the modern cartoonists 
realize, nothing is more effective than a well-planned series. 
It is like the constant dropping that wears away the stone. 
The most potent pictorial satire has always been the gradual 
elaboration of some clever idea — the periodic reappearance 
of the same characters in slightly modified environment, like 
the successive chapters of a serial story. The public learn 
to look forward to them, and hail each reappearance with a 




renewed burst of enthusiasm. The cartoonists of the Civil 
War do not seem to have grasped this idea. A single ex- 
ample will serve as an illustration. A clever cartoon, en- 
titled " Virginia Pausing," appeared just at the time that 
Virginia, the last of the States to secede, joined the Con- 

166 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



167 



federacy. The several Southern States, represented as young 
rats, are gayly scampering off, in the order in which they 
seceded, South Carolina heading the procession. Virginia 





4— L 






SOMK ENVELOPES OF THE TIME OK THE WAR. 

straggling in the rear finds herself under the paw of " Uncle 
Abe," represented as a watchful and alert old mouser, and 
has paused, despite herself, to consider her next step. The 
Union, personified as the mother rat of the brood, lies stark 
and stiff on her back, with the Stars and Stripes waving over 
her corpse, and underneath, the legend, " The Union must 
and shall be preserved." Now this idea of the Southern 
States as a brood of " Secession rats " was capable of infinite 
elaboration. It might have been carried on throughout the 
entire four years of the struggle, the procession preserving the 
same significant order, with South Carolina in the lead, 



i6S 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



V 



Virginia bringing up the rear, and Lincoln, 
as a wise and resourceful mouser, ever in 
pursuit. It could have shown the rats at 
bay, cornered, entrapped — in short, the 
whole history of the war in a form of genial 
allegory. But if the initial cartoon, " Vir- 
ginia Pausing," ever had a sequel, it 
perished in the general wreckage of the 
Confederacy. 

The welcome which awaited caricature, 
even of the crudest sort, at the outbreak of 
the war is illustrated by the curious vogue 
enjoyed by envelopes adorned with all sorts 
of patriotic and symbolic devices — an iso- 
lated tombstone inscribed " Jeff Davis 
alone," a Confederate Mule, blanketed 
with the Stars and Bars — a slave-owner 
vainly brandishing his whip and shouting 
to a runaway slave, " Come back here, you 
black rascal." The latter, safe within the 
shadow of Fortress Monroe, defiantly 
places his thumb to his nose, and in allusion 
to General Butler's famous decision, re- 
torts: "Can't come back, nohow, massa. 
Dis chile's CONTRABAN'." 

It is not surprising to find that Lincoln 
throughout the struggle was a favorite 
subject for the caricaturist. His tall, 
ungainly, loose-knit figure, his homely 
features, full of noble resolve, seemed to offer a standing 
challenge to the cartoonist, who usually treated him with in- 
dulgent kindness. The exceptions are all the more con- 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



169 



spicuous. A case in point is the cartoon commemorating 
Lincoln's first call for volunteers for three months — a period 
then supposed to be ample for crushing out the rebellion. 
The artist has represented Lincoln as the image of imbecilic 
dismay, while a Union soldier with a sternly questioning gaze 




relentlessly presents to him a promissory note indorsed, 
" I promise to subdue the South in 90 days. Abe Lincoln." 
A much more typical and kindly cartoon of Lincoln is the one 
representing him as emulating the feat of Blondin and cross- 
ing the rapids of Niagara on a tight-rope, bearing the negro 
problem on his shoulders, and sustaining his equipoise with 
the aid of a balancing pole labeled " Constitution." 

The really clever cartoons of this period are so few in 
number, and stand out so prominently from a mass of second- 
rate material, that there is real danger of attaching undue 



\yo 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



importance to them. Such a plate as " The Southern Con- 
federacy a Fact! Acknowledged by a Mighty Prince and 
Faithful Ally," which was issued by a Philadelphia publisher 
in 1 86 1, although crudely drawn, is one of the very few that 
show the influence of the early English school. It represents 
the Devil and his assembled Cabinet in solemn conclave, re- 
ceiving the envoys of the Southern Confederacy. The latter 




includes, among others, Jeff Davis, General Beauregard, and 
a personification of " Mr. Mob Law, Chief Justice." They 
are bearers of credentials setting forth the fundamental prin- 
ciples of the government, as " Treason, Rebellion, Murder, 
Robbery, Incendiarism, Theft, etc." Satan, interested in 
spite of himself, is murmuring to his companions, " I am 
afraid in Rascality they will beat us." 

An effective allegorical cartoon, which appeared at a time 






CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



171 



when the cause of the Union seemed almost hopeless, pictures 
Justice on the rock of the Constitution dressed in the Stars 
and Stripes and waving an American flag toward a happier 
scene, where the sun of Universal Freedom is brightly shin- 
ing. Behind her are hideous scenes of disorder and national 
disaster. A loathsome serpent, of which the head is called 
" Peace Compromise," the body, " Mason and Dixon's 




Line," and the tail " Copperhead," is crawling up the rock 
seeking to destroy her. In one of its coils it is crushing out 
the lives of a number of black women and children. In one 
corner of the cartoon the figure of a winged Satan is hovering 
gleefully over a mob which is hanging a negro to a lamp- 
post — an allusion to the Draft Riots in New York. Some of 
the mob are bearing banners with the words " Black Men 
have no Rights." In the shadowy background of the picture 



172 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



a slaveholder is lashing his slave, tied to a post, with a whip 
called " Lawful Stimulant." An unctuous capitalist is talk- 
ing with a group of Secessionists, seated on a rock called 
" State Rights." In contrast with the dark picture on which 
Justice has turned her back is the bright vista of the future, 
" The Union as it will be," into which she is looking. There 
we see a broad river and a prosperous city. A negress, free 
and happy, is sewing by her cabin door, her child reading a 
book upon her knee. 








"is. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE FOUR-YEARS' STRUGGLE 

MANY of the best cartoons of the period revolve 
around the rivalry between General McClellan 
and General Grant, and the incidents of the 
McClellan-Lincoln campaign of 1864. " The Old Bull-dog 
on the Right Track " is one of the best products of the war 
cartoonists. It represents Grant as a thoroughbred bull- 
dog, seated in dogged tenacity of purpose on the " Weldon 
Railroad," and preparing to fight it out on that line, if it takes 
all summer. At the end of the line is a kennel, labeled 
" Richmond," and occupied by a pack of lean, cowardly 
hounds, Lee, Davis, and Beauregard among the number, who 
are yelping : " You aint got the kennel yet, old fellow ! " A 
bellicose little dwarf, McClellan, is advising the bulldog's 
master: "Uncle Abraham, don't you think you had better 




call the old dog off now? I'm afraid he'll hurt these other 
dogs, if he catches hold of them! " To which President 
Lincoln serenely rejoins: " Why, little Mac, that's the same 
pack of curs that chased you aboard of the gunboat two years 

175 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 177 

ago. They are pretty nearly used up now, and I think it's 
best to go in and finish them." 

The conservative policy which marked the military career 
of General McClellan and his candidacy for the Presidency 
in 1864 is ridiculed in a cartoon entitled "Little Mac, in 
His Great Two-Horse Act, in the Presidential Canvass of 
1864." Here McClellan is pictured as a circus rider about 
to come to grief, owing to the unwillingness of his two steeds 
to pull together in harmony. A fiery and stalwart horse 
represents " war " ; while peace is depicted as a worthless and 
broken-down hack. Little Mac is saying, " Curse them balky 
horses — I can't manage the Act nohow. One threw me in 
Virginia, and the other is bound the wrong way." In the 
background is the figure of Lincoln attired as a clown. ' You 
tried to ride them two horses on the Peninsula for two years, 
Mac," he calls out, " but it wouldn't work." 

Another striking cartoon of this Presidential campaign 
depicts the Republican leaders burying the War Democracy. 
The cartoon is called " The Grave of the Union," and was 
drawn by Zeke. The hearse is being driven by Secretary 
Stanton, who commenced, " My jackasses had a load, but 
they pulled it through bravely." In harness and attached 
to the bodies of jackasses are the heads of Cochrane, Butler, 
Meagher, and Dickinson. At the head of the grave, a sort of 
master of ceremonies, is the familiar figure of Horace Gree- 
ley, saying, " I guess we'll bury it so deep that it will never 
get up again." By his side is Lincoln, who is inquiring, 
" Chase, will it stay down? " to which Chase replies, " My 
^God, it must stay down, or we shall go up." The funeral 
service is being conducted by Henry Ward Beecher, who is 
carrying a little negro in his arms. " Not thy will, O Lord, 
but mine be done." Beecher is reading from the book before 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 179 

him. The coffins about to be lowered into the grave are 
marked respectively " Free Speech and Free Press," " Ha- 
beas Corpus," and " Union." 

One of the most striking caricatures suggested by the con- 
test between Lincoln and McClellan for the Presidency of 
1864 is entitled " The Abolition Catastrophe; or, the Novem- 
ber Smash-up." It is really nothing more than the old 
hackneyed idea of the " Presidential Steeplechase " presented 
in a new guise. The artist, however, proved himself to be a 
false prophet. It shows a race to the White House between 
two trains, in which the one on which Lincoln is serving as 
engineer has just come to destruction on the rocks of " Eman- 
cipation," " Confiscation," and " $400,000,000,000 Public 
Debt." The train in the charge of General McClellan, its 
locomotive flying the flag " Constitution," is running along 
smoothly and rapidly and is just turning the curve leading up 
to the door of the White House. McClellan, watching from 
his cab the discomfiture of his foe, calls derisively, " Wouldn't 
you like to swap horses now, Lincoln?" In the coaches 
behind are the elated passengers of the Democratic train. 
In striking contrast is the plight in which the Republican 
Party is shown. Lincoln, thrown up in the air by the shock 
of the collision, calls back to his rival, " Don't mention it, 
Mac, this reminds me of a " — an allusion to the President's 
fondness for illustrating every argument with a story. From 
the debris of the wreck of the locomotive peer out the faces 
of the firemen — two very black negroes. One is calling, 
" War's de rest ob dis ole darky? Dis wot yer call 'manci- 
pation?" And the other, "Lor' A'mighty! Massa Lin- 
cum, is dis wot yer call Elewating de Nigger?" The pas- 
sengers behind are in an equally unhappy strait. Secretary 
Stanton, pinned under the wheels of the first coach, is crying, 



i8o 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



" Oh, dear ! If I could telegraph this to Dix I'd make it out 
a victory." Among the passengers may be recognized the 
countenances of Beecher, Butler, and Seward, while blown up 




OR MAJOR JACK DOV 



M DRAWN BY ZEKE 



From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 

in the air is Horace Greeley, calling out to Lincoln that the 
disaster only verifies the prediction which had been printed 
in the Tribune. Popular discontent at the unreliability of 
news of the war found utterance in a skit representing Lincoln 
as a bartender occupied in concocting a mixed drink, called 
" New York Press," which he is dexterously pouring back and 
forth between two tumblers, labeled respectively " Victory " 
and " Defeat." The ingredients are taken from bottles of 
" Bunkum," " Bosh," " Brag," and " Soft Sawder." 



182 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




THE BLOCKADE ON THE "CONN ECTICUT PLAN" 



From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 



■. 



In the same series as the " Abolition Catastrophe " is a 
cartoon entitled " Miscegenation; or, the Millennium of Abo- 
lition," intended to depict the possible alarming consequences 
of proclaiming the whole colored race free and equal. It 
humorously depicts a scene in which there is absolute social 
equality between the whites and the blacks. At one end of the 
picture Mr. Lincoln is receiving with great warmth and 
cordiality Miss Dinah Arabella Aramintha Squash, a negress 
of unprepossessing appearance, who has as her escort Henry 
Ward Beecher. At a table nearby Horace Greeley is treating 
another gorgeously attired negress to ice cream. Two re- 
pulsive-looking negroes are making violent love to two white 
women. A passing carriage in charge of a white coachman 
and two white footmen contains a negro family. In the back- 




"if. 



1 84 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



ground, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others are expressing 
their astonishment at the condition in which they find 
American society. 

The attempt at escape, the apprehension and the incarcera- 
tion of the President of the Confederacy are illustrated in a 
long series of cartoons. Two of the best are " The Con- 
federacy in Petticoats " and " Uncle Sam's Menagerie." 




THE CONFEDERACY IN PETTICOAT^. 

From the collection of the JVezv York Historical Society. 

The first deals with the capture of Jefferson Davis at Irwins- 
ville by General Wilson's cavalry. Davis, attired in feminine 
dress, is climbing over a fence in order to escape his pursuers. 
He has dropped his handbag, but he still holds his un- 
sheathed knife. " I thought your government was too 
magnanimous to hunt down women and children," he calls 
out to the Union soldiers, one of whom has caught him by the 
skirts and is trying to drag him back. Mrs. Davis, by her 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



185 



husband's side, is entreating, " Don't irritate the President. 
He might hurt somebody." 

The cartoon " Uncle Sam's Menagerie " shows Davis in 
captivity at Fortress Monroe. The Confederate president 
is depicted as a hyena in a cage, playing with a human skull. 
An Uncle Sam of the smooth-faced type in which he at first 
appeared is the showman. Round Davis's neck is a noose 




From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 

connecting with a huge gallows and the rope is about to be 
drawn taut, while from an organ below the cage a musician 
is grinding out the strain, " Yankee Doodle." In the shape 
of birds perched on little gallows of their own above the 
President's cage, each with a noose around his neck, are the 
figures of the other leaders of the Confederacy. A crow is 
pecking at a grinning skull under which is written " Booth." 



1 86 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



To this skull Uncle Sam is playfully pointing with his show- 
man's cane. 

Alleged Republican intimidation at the poles in the election 
of 1864 is assailed in a cartoon representing a Union soldier 
about to cast his vote for McClellan. A thick-lipped negro 
stands guard over the ballot box, rifle in hand. He presents 
the point of the bayonet at the soldier's decorated breast. 
" Hallo, dar! " he calls out threateningly, " you can't put in 




From the collection of the New York Historical Society. 



dat, you copper-head traitor, nor any odder, 'cept for Massa 
Lincoln." To which the soldier sadly replies, " I am an 
American citizen and did not think I had fought and bled 
for this. Alas, my country! " A corrupt election clerk is 
regarding the scene with disquiet. " I'm afraid we shall 
have trouble if that soldier is not allowed to vote," he says. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



187 



To which a companion cynically replies, " Gammon him, just 
turn round; you must pretend you see nothing of the kind 
going on, and keep on counting your votes." 




THE NATION MOURNING AT LINCOLN S BIER. 

By Tenniel in "Punch." 



CHAPTER XX 

NATIONS AND MEN IN CARICATURE 

IN looking over the historical and political caricature of 
the nineteenth century, one very naturally finds several 
different methods of treatment and subdivision suggest- 
ing themselves. First, there is the obvious method of 
chronological order, which is being followed in the present 
volume, and which commended itself as being at once the 
simplest and the most comprehensive. It is the one method 
by which the history of the century may be regarded as the 
annals of a family of nations — a grotesque family of ill- 
assorted quadrupeds and still more curious bipeds, stepping 
forth two by two frOm the pages of comic art as from the 
threshold of some modern Noah's ark — Britannia and the 
British lion, Columbia and Uncle Sam, India and the Bengal 
tiger, French Liberty and the imperial eagle. It is the one 
method which focuses the attention upon the inter-relation, 
the significant groupings of these symbolic figures, and dis- 
regards their individual and isolated actions. What the 
Russian bear, the British lion, are doing in the seclusion of 
their respective fastnesses is of vastly less interest than the 
spectacle of the entire royal menagerie of Europe uniting in 
an effort to hold Napoleon at bay. In other words, this 
method enables us to pass lightly over questions of purely 
national interest and home policy — the Corn Laws of Eng- 
land, the tariff issues in the United States — and to keep the eye 
centered upon the really big dramas of history, played upon 
an international stage. It subordinates caricature itself to 

188 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 189 

the sequence of great events and great personages. It is the 
Emperor Napoleon, his reign and his wars, and not the 
English caricaturist Gillray; it is Louis Philippe, the bour- 
geois king, and not Philipon and Daumier, who form the 
center of interest. In other words, from the present point 
of view, the caricature itself is not so much the object looked 
at as it is a powerful and clairvoyant lens through which we 
may behold past history in the curiously distorted form in 
which it was mirrored back by contemporary public opinion. 

Other methods, however, might be used effectively, each 
offering some special advantage of its own. For instance, 
the whole history of the nineteenth century might be divided, 




FIGURES FROM A TRIUMPH. 



190 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 






so to speak, geographically. The separate history of each 
nation might have been followed down in turn — the chang- 
ing fortunes of England, typified by John Bull; of Russia 
in the guise of the bear; of the United States under the forms 
of the swarthy, smooth-faced Jonathan of early days, and the 
pleasanter Uncle Sam of recent years; and of France, typified 
at different times as an eagle, as a Gallic cock, as an angry 
goddess, and as a plump, pleasant-faced woman in a tri- 
colored petticoat. Again, if it were desirable to emphasize 




THE DIAGNOSIS. 



" A bad regime during ten years All your 
trouble comes from that. You will soon be- 
come convalescent with a good constitution 
and fewer leeches." 

the development of comic art rather than its influence in 
history, one might group the separate divisions of the subject 
around certain schools of caricature, dealing first with Gill- 
ray, Rowlandson, and their fellows among the allied Con- 



CENTURY TN CARICATURE 



191 



tinental nations; passing thence to the caricaturists of 1830, 
and thence carrying the sequence through Leech, Cham, 




THE EGEREAN NYMPH. 
By Da it liner. 

Tenniel, Nast, down to the caricaturists who in the closing 
years of the century developed the scope of caricature to a 
hitherto unparalleled extent. Still again, the history of the 
century in caricature might be traced along from some 
peculiarity, greatly exaggerated, of some great man to an- 
other personal peculiarity of some other great man; leaping 
from the tri-cornered hat of the Emperor Napoleon to the 
great nose of the Iron Duke, then on to the toupet and pear- 
shaped countenance of Louis Philippe, the emaciation of 
Abraham Lincoln, the grandpa's hat of the Harrison ad- 



192 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



ministration, the forehead curl of Disraeli, the collar of 
Gladstone, the turned-up moustaches of the Emperor 
William, and the prominent teeth of Mr. Roosevelt. This 
feature of the caricature seems important enough to justify 
a brief digression. It forms one of the foundation stones 
of the art, second only in importance to the conventionalized 
symbols of the different nations. From the latter the car- 
toonist builds up the century's history as recorded in its great 
events. From the former he traces that history as recorded 
in the personality of its great men. 

The cartoons in which these different peculiarities of per- 



nf 




PAUL AND VIRGINIA. 

Bv Gill. 



sonal appearance are emphasized cover the whole range of 
caricature, and the whole gamut of public opinion which in- 
spired it. Here we may find every degree of malice, from 






CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



i93 



the fierce goggle eyes and diabolical expression which Gill- 
ray introduced into his portraits of the hated Bonaparte down 
to the harmless exaggeration of the collar points by which 
Furniss good-naturedly satirized the appearance of Mr. 
Gladstone. Again, in this respect caricature varies much, 
because all the great men of the century did not offer to the 
caricaturists the same opportunities in the matter of unusual 
features or personal eccentricities. 

The authentic portraits and contemporary descriptions of 
the first Napoleon show us that he was a man whose appear- 
ance was marred by no particular eccentricity of feature, and 




THE FIRST CONSCRIPT OF FRANCE. 
By Gill. 

\ that the cartoons of which he is the principal subject are 
largely allegorical, or inspired by the artist's intensity of 
hatred. One German caricaturist, by a subtle distortion and 
a lengthening of the cheeks and chin, introduced a resem- 



i94 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

blance to a rapacious wolf while preserving something of the 
real likeness. But in the goggle-eyed monsters of Gillray 
there is nothing save the hat and the uniform which suggests 
the real Napoleon. It was a sort of incarnation of Beelze- 
bub which Gillray wished to draw and did draw, a mon- 
strosity designed to rouse the superstitious hatred of the 
ignorant and lower classes of England, and to excite the na- 
tion to a warlike frenzy. The caricature aimed at Bona- 
parte's great rival, the conqueror of Waterloo, was pro- 
duced in more peaceful times, was the work of his own 
countryman, was based mainly on party differences, and, 
naturally enough, it was in the main good-natured and 
kindly. Wellington in caricature may be summed up by say- 
ing that it was all simply an exaggeration of the size of his 
nose. The poire drawn into resemblance of the countenance 
of Louis Philippe was originally innocent enough, and had 
it been entirely ignored by the monarch and his ministers, 
would probably have had no political effect, and in the course 
of a few years been entirely forgotten. But being taken seri- 
ously and characterized as seditious, it acquired an exagger- 
ated significance which may almost be said to have led to the 
revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Re- 
public. From the rich material offered by our War of Seces- 
sion the caricaturists drew little more than the long, gaunt 
figure and the scraggy beard of Lincoln, and the cigar of 
General Grant. The possibilities of this cigar, as they prob- 
ably would have been brought out by an artist like Daumier, 
have been suggested in an earlier chapter. It was the goatee of 
Louis Napoleon that was exaggerated to give a point to most 
of the cartoons in which he was a figure, although during the 
days of his power there were countless caricatures which 
drew suggestions from the misadventures of his early life, 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



•95 



his alleged experiences as a waiter in New York and a police- 
man in London, his escape from prison in the clothes of the 
workman Badinguet (a name which his political enemies ap- 




THE SITUATION. 

By Gill. 



plied to him very freely), and the fiasco at Strasburg. No 
men of their time were more freely caricatured than Disraeli 
in England and Thiers in France, for no men offered more to 
the caricaturist, Disraeli being at once a Jew and the most 
exquisite of affected dandies, and Thiers being, with the ex- 
ception of Louis Blanc, the smallest man of note in France. 
In one cartoon in Punch, Disraeli was figured as presiding 
over " Fagin's Political School." In another he was repre- 
sented as a hideous Oriental peri fluttering about the gates 
of Paradise. Thiers's large head and diminutive stature 
are subjects of countless cartoons, in which he is shown 
emerging from a wineglass or concealed in a waistcoat 



196 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

pocket, although Punch once humorously depicted him as 
Gulliver bound down by the Lilliputians. 

If one were to attempt to draw a broad general distinction 
between French and English caricature throughout the cen- 
tury, it would be along the line of English superiority in the 
matter of satirizing great events, French superiority in sat- 
irizing great men. The English cartoonists triumphed in 
the art of crowded canvases and effective groupings; the 
French in seizing upon the salient feature of face or form, 
and by a grotesque distortion, a malicious quirk, fixing upon 
their luckless subject a brand of ridicule that refused to be 
forgotten. Although the fashion of embodying fairly rec- 
ognizable portraits of prominent statesmen in caricatures 
became general in England early in the century, for a long 
time the effect was marred by their lack of facial expression. 
From situations of all sorts, ranging from high comedy to 
deadly peril and poignant suffering, the familiar features 
of British statesmen look forth placid, unconcerned, with 
the fixed, impersonal stare of puppets in a Punch-and-Judy 
show. No French artist ever threw away his opportunities 
in such a foolish, spendthrift manner. Even where the 
smooth, regular features of some especially characterless 
face gave little or nothing for a satiric pencil to seize upon, 
a Daumier or a Gill would manufacture a ludicrous effect 
through the familiar device of a giant's head on a dwarf's 
body, or the absurdly distorted reflection of a cylindrical 
mirror. But by the time hostilities broke out between France 
and Prussia facial caricature had become an important factor 
in the British school of satire, as exemplified in the weekly 
pages of Punch. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 

THIS was very natural, because the history of these 
years was largely a history of individuals. Dur- 
ing the years between the close of the Civil War 
and the outbreak of war between France and Prussia the 
three dominant figures in European political caricature were 
the French Emperor, Prince Bismarck, and Benjamin Dis- 




LOUIS BLANC. 



raeli. Since 1848, Louis Napoleon had been the most widely 
caricatured man in Europe; and the outcome of the War of 
1866 had raised Bismarck, as the pilot of the Prussian ship 

197 



198 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



of state, to an importance second only to Napoleon himself. 
The caricature of which Disraeli was the subject was nec- 
essarily much narrower in its scope, and confined to a great 
extent to England. It was not until the century's eighth 




RIVAL ARBITERS. 



Napoleon and Bismarck at the time of the 
Austro-Prussian War. 

By Tennielin Punch. 

decade that he received full recognition at the hands of the 
Continental caricaturists, and his prominence in the cartoons 
preceding the Franco-Prussian War was due to the prestige 
of Punchy and to the opportunity which his own peculiar 
personality and striking appearance offered to the carica- 
turists. It was not long after the fall of Richmond and the 
end of the war that the agitation over the claims of the 
United States against England on account of the damage 
done by the warship Alabama, a question which was not 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



199 



settled until a number of years later, began. The two powers 
for a time could not agree on any scheme of arbitration, and 
the condition of affairs in the autumn of 1865 was summed 
up by Tenniel in Punch, in a cartoon entitled " The Disputed 
Account," in which the United States and England are rep- 
resented as two haggling women and Madame Britannia is 
haughtily saying: " Claim for damages against me? Non- 
sense, Columbia ! Don't be mean over money matters." 
But England, as well as America, had other matters besides 
the Alabama claims to disturb her and to keep busy the 




THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. 
By Andre Gill- 



pencils of her cartoonists. Besides purely political issues at 
home, there were the Jamaica troubles and Fenianism; and 
the French Emperor was very urgent that stronger extradi- 
tion treaties should be established between the two countries. 



200 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



This last issue was cleverly hit off by Punch in a cartoon 
which pictures Britannia showing Napoleon the Third a 
portrait of himself as he appeared in 1848 and saying: 
' That, Sire, is the portrait of a gentleman whom I should 
have had to give up to the French Government had I always 
translated ' extradition ' as your Majesty's lawyers now 







THE MAN WHO THINKS. 
By Andre Gill. 



wish." The agitation over the Jamaica troubles died out, 
the threatened Fenian invasion of Canada came to nothing, 
Louis Napoleon withdrew the French troops from Mexico, 
and the eyes of Europe were directed toward the war cloud 
hovering over Prussia and Austria. Early in June, 1866, 
there was a cessation of diplomatic relations between the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



20 1 



two countries, followed immediately by a declaration of war 
on the part of Prussia, whose armies straightway entered 
Saxony and Hanover. The attitude of England and France 
toward the belligerents was the subject of Punch's cartoon 
that week. It was called " Honesty and Policy," and shows 
Britannia and Napoleon discussing the situation, while in the 
background the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor 
are shaking their fists in each other's faces. Britannia con- 









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TO BE OR NOT TO BE. 
By Gill. 



fides regretfully to Napoleon: "Well, I've done my best. 
If they must smash each other, they must." And the French 
Emperor says in a gleeful aside: "And someone may pick 
up the pieces! " The same figure of speech is further de- 
veloped in a later cartoon which appeared in August, during 
the negotiations for peace. Napoleon III., in the guise of 
a ragpicker, is being warned off the Konigstrasse by Bis- 



202 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



marck: " Pardon, mon ami, but we really can't allow you 
to pick up anything here;" and "Nap. the Chiffonnier " 
rejoins: "Pray, don't mention it, M'sieu ! It's not of the 
slightest consequence." 

After the battle of Sadowa, Austria accepted readily the 
offer of the French Emperor to bring about a suspension of 
hostilities, the Emperor of Austria agreeing to cede Venetia, 
which was handed over to France, as a preliminary to its 
cession to Italy. Tenniel pictured this event in a cartoon 




ACHILLES IN RETREAT. 
By Gill. 



showing Napoleon acting as the temporary keeper of the 
Lion of St. Mark's. Bismarck was now becoming a conspicu- 
ous figure in European politics, and his rivalry to Napoleon 
is shown in a Punch cartoon entitled " Rival Arbiters," which 
appeared about this time. 






CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



203 



The growing spirit of discontent in France during the 
year or two immediately preceding the Franco-Prussian War 
was made the subject of some excellent Punch cartoons. One 
of these, called " Easing the Curb," appeared in July, 1869. 
The imperial rule was gradually becoming unpopular, and 
the opposition gaining in strength and boldness. The Em- 




THE PRESIDENT OF RHODES. 
By Daumier. 



peror found it prudent to announce that it was his intention to 
grant to the French Chamber a considerable extension of 
power. In " Easing the Curb," Punch depicts France as a 
horse drawing the imperial carriage. Within are the 
Empress and the Prince Imperial, evidently greatly alarmed. 



204 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Napoleon is standing at the horse's head, calling out: " Have 
no fear, my dears. I shall just drop ze curb a leetel." In 
another cartoon a few months later, Napoleon the Third is 
shown wearing the crown of King John, and surrounded by 




A TEMPEST IN A GLASS OF WATER. 
By Gill. 



a group of persistent barons, signing a magna charta for 
France. 

In the pages of Punch from July, 1870, until the spring of 
1 87 1, one may follow very closely the history of the Franco- 
Prussian War and of the Commune. The first of the car- 
toons on this subject, published just before the declaration of 
war, is entitled " A Duel to the Death." In it the King of 
Prussia and the French Emperor are shown as duellists, 
sword in hand, while Britannia is endeavoring to act as medi- 
ator. " Pray stand back, madam," says Napoleon. " You 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 205 

mean well, but this is an old family quarrel and we must fight 
it out." Punch seemed to have an early premonition of 
what the result of the war would be, for, before any decisive 
battle had been fought, it published a striking cartoon en- 
titled " A Vision on the Way," representing the shade of the 
great Napoleon confronting the Emperor and his son on the 
warpath, and bidding them " Beware! " The departure of 




A DUEL TO THE DEATH. 
By Tenniel in "Punch." 



the Prince Imperial to the front is made the subject of a very 
pretty and pathetic cartoon called " Two Mothers." It shows 
the Empress bidding farewell to her son, while France, as 
another weeping mother, is saying: "Ah, madam, a sure 
happiness for you, sooner or later ; but there were dear sons of 
mine whom I shall never see again." 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE DEBACLE 

FTER the unimportant engagement at Saarbriick 
disaster began falling thick and fast on the French 
arms, and soon we find Punch taking up again the 
idea of the two monarchs as rival duelists. By this time the 
duel has been decided. Louis Napoleon, sorely wounded and 



;4FT 

A 




FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 187O. 

" Aux arraes, citoyens, 
Formez vos bataillons." 

with broken sword, is leaning against a tree. " You have 

fought gallantly, sir," says the King. " May I not hear you 

say you have had enough ? " To which the Emperor replies : 

206 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



207 



" I have been deceived about my strength. I have no choice." 
With Sedan, the downfall of the Empire, and the establish- 
ment of the Republic, France ceased to be typified under the 
form of Louis Napoleon. Henceforth she became an angry, 
blazing-eyed woman, calling upon her sons to rise and repel 
the advance of the invader. The cartoon in Punch commemo- 
rating September 4, 1870, when the Emperor was formally 
deposed and a Provisional Government of National Defense 
established under the Presidency of General Trochu, with 




HER BAPTISM OF FIRE. 
By Tewiiel in "Punch." 



Gambetta, Favre, and Jules Ferry among its leading mem- 
bers, shows her standing erect by the side of a cannon, the 
imperial insignia trampled beneath her feet, waving aloft the 
flag of the Republic, and shouting from the " Marseillaise " : 



Aux armes, citoyens, 
Formez vos bataillons! " 



208 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



The announcement that the German royal headquarters 
was to be removed to Versailles, and that the palace of Louis 
XIV. was to shelter the Prussian King surrounded by his 
conquering armies, drew from Tenniel the cartoon in which 
he showed the German monarch seated at his table in the 
palace studying the map of Paris, while in the background are 
the ghosts of Louis XIV. and the great Napoleon. The 




ANDRE GILL. 



ghost of the Grand Monarque is asking sadly: " Is this the 
end of ' all the glories ' ? " The sufferings of Paris during 
the siege are summed up in a cartoon entitled " Germany's 
Ally," in which the figure of Famine is laying its cold, gaunt 
hand on the head of the unhappy woman typifying the 
stricken city. The beginning of the bombardment was com- 
memorated in a cartoon entitled " Her Baptism of Fire," 
showing the grim and bloody results of the falling of the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



209 




LE MARQUIS AUX TALONS ROUGES. 

By Willette. 

The Marquis de Galliffet will be remembered 
as the French Minister of War during the sec- 
ond Dreyfus trial. It was Willette's famous 
cartoon of Queen Victoria which stirred up so 
much ill feeling during the Boer War. 

first shells. The whole tone of Punch after the downfall of 
the Emperor shows a growing sympathy on the part of the 
English people toward France, and the feeling in England 
that Germany, guided by the iron hand of Bismarck, was 
exacting a cruel and unjust penalty entirely out of proportion. 
This belief that the terms demanded by the Germans were 
harsh and excessive is shown in the Punch cartoon " Excessive 
Bail," where Justice, after listening to Bismarck's argument, 



2IO 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



says that she cannot " sanction a demand for exorbitant 
securities." 

French caricature during " the terrible year " which saw 
Gravelotte, Sedan, and the downfall of the Empire was 
necessarily somber and utterly lacking in French gayety. It 
was not until the tragic days of the Siege and the Commune 
that the former strict censorship of the French press was 



_*A/|r C( 




THE HISTORY OF A REIGN. 

By Daumier in " Charivari." 



3VJ 1 

v4^ L ' on* 




"this has killed that." 
By Daumier in " Charivari." 



212 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



I"*"* F") 1 O /"^ 1 *T ^ lr ~? 



i-4 




THE MOUSE-TRAP AND ITS VICTIMS. 
i?i/ Daumier in "' Charivari.'" 



relaxed, and the floodgates were suddenly opened for a veri- 
table inundation of cartoons. M. Armand Dayot, in his 
admirable pictorial history of this epoch, which has already 
been frequently cited in the present volume, says in this con- 
nection : " It has been said with infinite justice that when art 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



213 



is absent from caricature nothing remains but vulgarity." In 
proof of this, one needs only to glance through the albums 
containing the countless cartoons that appeared during the 
Siege, and more especially during the Commune. Aside from 
those signed by Daumier, Cham, Andre Gill, and a few other 
less famous artists, they are unclean compositions, without 




PRUSSIA ANNEXES ALSACE. 

By Cham in " Charivari." 



design or wit, odious in color, the gross stupidity of their 
legends rivaling their lamentable poverty of execution. But 
under the leadership of Daumier, the small group of artists 
who infused their genius into the weekly pages of Charivari, 
made these tragic months one of the famous periods in the 
annals of French caricature. Of the earlier generation, the 
irrepressible group whose mordant irony had hastened the 
downfall of Louis Philippe, Daumier alone survived to 
chronicle by his pencil the disasters which befell France, with 



214 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



a talent as great as he had possessed thirty-odd years before, 
when engaged in his light-hearted and malicious campaign 
against the august person of Louis Philippe. Then there 




" Oh, no ! Prussia has not completely slain 
her. It is not yet time to go to her aid." 
By Cham in " C/tart'va?-t." 

were the illustrious " Cham " (Comte de Noe), and Andre 
Gill (a caricaturist of striking wit), Hadol, De Bertall, De 
Pilopel, Faustin, Draner, and a number of others not so well 
known. But, above all, it was Daumier who, after twenty 
years of the Empire, during which his pencil had been politi- 
cally idle, returned in his old age to the fray with all the vigor 
of the best days of La Caricature. 

Yet to those whose sympathies were with France during 
the struggle of 1870-71, there is a distinct pathos in the 
change that is seen in the later work of Daumier — not a per- 
sonal pathos, but a pathos due to the changed condition of the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



215 



country which it reflects. The old dauntless audacity, the 
trenchant sarcasm, the mocking, light-hearted laughter, is 
gone. In its place is the haunting bitterness of an old man, 
under the burden of an impotent wrath — a man who, for all 
that he dips his pencil in pure vitriol, cannot do justice to the 
nightmare visions that beset him. There is no better com- 
mentary upon the pervading feeling of helpless anger and 
outraged national pride of this epoch than in these haunting 
designs of Daumier's. They are the work of a man tremu- 
lous with feverish indignation, weird and ghastly conceptions, 
such as might have emanated from the caldron of Macbeth's 




"Adieu !" 

" No, ' au revoir.' Visits must be returned." 

By Cham. 

witches. The backgrounds are filled in with solid black, like 
a funeral pall; and from out the darkness the features of Bis- 
marck, of Von Moltke, of William I., leer malevolently, dis- 
torted into hideous, ghoulish figures — vampires feasting upon 



2l6 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



the ruin they have wrought. French liberty, in the guise of 
a wan, emaciated, despairing figure, the personification of a 
wronged and outraged womanhood, haunts Daumier's pages. 
At one time she is standing, bound and gagged, between the 
gaping muzzles of two cannon marked, respectively, " Paris, 
1851," and "Sedan, 1870," and underneath the laconic 
legend, " Histoire d'un Regne." 

Another cartoon shows France as a female Prometheus 
bound to the rock, her vitals being torn by the Germanic vul- 



ICNlRS.«tC»['S 




SOUVENIRS AND REGRETS. 



By A7-anda. 

ture. A number of these cartoons, all of which appeared in 
La Charivari, treat bitterly of the disastrous results of the 
twenty years during which Louis Napoleon was the Emperor 
of the French. The sketch called " This Has Killed That " 
has allusion to the popular ballot which elected the Prince- 
President to the throne. A gaunt, angry female figure is 




3 




PRUSSIA INTRODUCING THE NEW NATIONAL ASSEMBLY TO 1-RANCE. 
By Daumier in " Charivari." 



220 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



pointing with one hand to the ballot-box, in which repose the 
" Ouis " which made Louis Napoleon an Emperor, and with 
the other to the corpses on the battlefield where the sun of his 
empire finally sets. " This," she cries, " has killed that." 
The same idea suggested a somewhat similar cartoon, in 
which a French peasant, gazing at the shell-battered ruins of 




"LET US EAT THE PRUSSIAN." 
By Andre Gill. 

his humble home, exclaims in the peasant's ungrammatical 
patois: "And it was for this that I voted 'Yes.'" Still 
more grim and ominous is the cartoon showing a huge mouse- 
trap with three holes. The mouse-trap represents the Plebi- 
scite. Two of the holes, marked respectively, " 1851 " and 
" 1870," have been sprung, and each has caught the throat of 
a victim. The third, however, still yawns open warningly, 
with the date not completely filled in. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 221 

Still another cartoon, thoroughly characteristic of Dau- 
mier's later manner, is " The Dream of Bismarck," one 
which touches upon the idea which has been used allegori- 
cally in connection with every great conqueror whose wake 
is marked by the strewn corpses of fallen thousands. In it 
Bismarck, frightfully haggard and ghastly of countenance, 
is sleeping in his chair, while at his side is the grim figure of 
Death bearing a huge sickle and pointing out over the bloody 
battlefield. 

Of the younger group of cartoonists none is more closely 
connected with the events of the annee terrible than " Cham," 
the Comte de Noe. The name Noe, it will be remembered, 
is French for Noah, just as Cham is the French equivalent of 
Ham, second son of the patriarch of Scripture. The Comte 
de Noe was also second son of his father, hence the ap- 
propriateness of his pseudonym. As a caricaturist, Cham 
was animated by no such seriousness of purpose as formed 
the inspiration of Daumier; and this was why he never 
became a really great caricaturist. It was the humorous side 
of life, even of the tragedies of life, that appealed to him, 
and he reflected it back with an incisive drollery which was 
irresistible. He was one of the most rapid and industrious 
of workers, and found in the events of V annee terrible the 
inspiration of a vast number of cartoons. The looting pro- 
pensities of the Prussians were satirized in a sketch showing 
two Prussian officers looking greedily at a clock on the 
mantelpiece in a French chateau. " Let us take the clock." 
" But peace has already been signed." " No matter. Don't 
you see the clock is slow? " The German acquisition of the 
Rhenish provinces is summed up in a picture which shows a 
German officer attaching to his leg a chain, at the end of 
which is a huge ball marked Alsace. The siege having 



222 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 







NEW DESIGN FOR A HAND BELL PROPOSED BY " CHARIVARI " FOR THE PUR- 
POSE OF REMINDING THE ASSEMBLY THAT PRUSSIAN TROOPS STILL HOLD 
FRENCH TERRITORY. 

By Daumier. 

turned every Parisan into a nominal soldier, this condition of 
affairs is hit off by Cham in a cartoon underneath which is 
written: "Everybody being soldiers, the officers will have 
the right to put through the paces anyone whom they meet in 
the streets." The sketch shows a cook in the usual culinary 
costume, and bearing on his head a flat basket filled with 
kettles and pans, marking time at the command of an officer. 
The attitude of England during the war seemed to the carica- 
turist perfidious, after the practical aid which France had 
rendered Albion in the Crimea. Cham hits this off by 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



223 



representing the two nations as women, Britannia looking 
ironically at prostrate France and saying: " Oh, no! Prussia 
has not yet entirely killed her ! So it is not yet time to go to 
her aid." 

The statesmen and warriors of that period were very 
happily caricatured in a series of cartoons, most of which 
appeared in L'Eclipse. Gill excelled in his caricature of 




Germany : " Farewell, Madame, and if 

France : " Ha ! We shall meet again ! " 

individual men rather than in the caricature of events or 
groups. His real name was Louis Alexandre Gosset. He 
was born at Landouzy-li-Ville, October 19, 1840, and died in 
Paris, December 29, 1885. Thiers, Gambetta, Louis Blanc, 
all the men of the time, were hit off by his pencil. His 
method in most cases consisted of the grotesque exaggeration 
of the subject's head at the expense of the body. He was 



224 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

PILQRI-PHRENOLOGIE. 




llUrtbaudmu 'Jos r s jDcmr 



^y^&r/ 



CUi lAutfm .Il.t.dtiTV.l.tjtfjt,. 



BISMARKOFF 1 

BISMARCK THE FIRST. 

especially happy in his caricature of Thiers, whose diminutive 
size, as well as his great importance, made him a favorite 
subject for the cartoonist. Thiers as Hamlet soliloquizing, 
" To be or not to be " ; Thiers as " The Man Who Laughs " ; 
the head of Thiers peering over the rim of a glass, " A 
tempest in a glass of water " ; Thiers as the first conscript of 
France; Thiers as Achilles in retreat — all these and count- 
less others are from the pencil of Gill. 

A striking satirical sketch by Hadol, entitled " La Parade," 
sums up all the buffooneries of the Second Empire. In it 



ICI ON fcE PASSE 
A LA niHVTZ. 




XROCHU — 1870. 



220 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



the Due de Morny as the barking showman is violently invit- 
ing the populace to enter and inspect the wonders of the 
Theatre Badinguet. Badinguet, as said before, was the 
name of the workman in whose clothes Louis Napoleon was 
said to have escaped from his imprisonment at Ham; and 
throughout the Second Empire it was the name by which the 
Parisians maliciously alluded to the Emperor. Behind De 







AxoH^be 



yANTF. 



BAZAINE. 

By Fans tin. 



Morny in the cartoon are the Emperor and Empress, seated 
at the cashier's desk at the entrance of the theater to take in 
the money of the dupes whom De Morny can persuade to 
enter. To the right and left, in grotesque attire, are the 
actors of the show, representing the various statesmen and 
soldiers whose names were connected with the reign. 

Popular hatred of Marshal Bazaine after the surrender of 
Metz, based on the prevalent belief that he had sold the city 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



227 



and the army under his command to the Germans, finds 
pictorial expression in the grim cartoon by Faustin, repro- 
duced here. The artist has cunningly drawn into the features 
of the Marshal an expression of unutterable craft and 
treachery. Round his neck there has been flung what at the 
first glance seems like a decoration of honor, an impression 
strengthened by the cross and inscription on his breast. But 
as you look more closely you perceive that this decoration is 
suspended from the noose of the hangman's rope, and that 




the words " Au Marechal Bazaine — La France Reconnais- 
sante " have another and a deeper significance. The de- 
fender of the city of Paris, General Trochu, was genially 
caricatured by Andre Gill in L'Eclipse as a blanchis sense 
industriously ironing out the dirty linen of France. How- 
ever great his popularity was at the time, Trochu has by no 
means escaped subsequent criticism. To him the resistance 
of Paris seemed nothing but " an heroic folly," and he had 




ENTREE SOLENNELLE DE L'EMPEREUR D'ALLEMAGNEA PARIS 
; Caricature de Fdlix Rggamey.) 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 229 

no hesitation about proclaiming his opinion. Another ex- 
ceedingly happy caricature by Andre Gill was that represent- 
ing Henri Rochefort, the implacable enemy of Louis 
Napoleon, as a member of the Government of the National 
Defense. Here Rochefort's head is shown peering out of 
the mouth of a cannon projecting through a hole in the city's 
fortifications. 



PART IV 

THE END OF THE CENTURY 
CHAPTER XXIII 

THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN CARICATURE 

DURING the period covered by the present chap- 
ter the foundation of the two leading American 
comic weeklies, Puck and Judge, the former in 
1877 and the latter in 1881, led to a distinct advance in 
political caricature in this country. It also made it possible 
for the first time to draw an intelligent comparison between 
the tendencies of caricature in England and in America. 
No one can look over the early files of Puck and Judge and 
compare them with Punch for the corresponding years with- 
out being struck with the contrast, not merely in methods of 
drawing and printing, but in the whole underlying spirit. 
For the past half century Punch has adhered faithfully to its 
original attitude of neutrality upon questions of party politics. 
Its aim has been to represent the weight of public opinion in 
a sober and conservative spirit; to discountenance and rebuke 
the excesses of whichever party is in power; to commemorate 
the great national calamities, as well as the occasions of 
national rejoicings. If it somewhat overstepped its estab- 
lished bounds in its repeated attacks upon Lord Beaconsfield 
because his foreign policy was regarded with distrust, it made 
amends with an eloquent tribute at the time of that states- 
man's death. And if on one occasion it cartooned him in the 
guise of the melancholy Dane, with broad impartiality it 

231 



232 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



travestied his great rival, Gladstone, a month or two later, in 
precisely the same character. Taken as a whole, the English 
cartoons are not so distinctly popular in tone as those in this 
country. The underlying thought is apt to be more cultured, 
more bookish, so to speak; to take the form of parodies upon 
Shakespere and Dante, Dickens and Scott. And yet, taking 
them all in all, it would be difficult to point out any parallel 
series of cartoons which, after the lapse of years, require so 
little explanation to make them intelligible, or which cover 




CARAN D'ACHE. 

in so comprehensive a manner the current history of the 
world. 

On the other hand, the typical American cartoon of a 
generation ago concerned itself but little with questions of 
international interest, while in its treatment of domestic 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



233 



affairs it was largely lacking in the dignity and restraint whiclji 
characterized the British school. Being founded upon party 
politics, its purpose was primarily not to reflect public opinion, 
but to mold it; to make political capital; to win votes by 
fair means, if possible, but to win them. From their very 
inception Puck and Judge, as the mouthpieces of their respec- 
tive parties, have exerted a formidable power, whose far- 
reaching influence it would be impossible to gauge, especially 
during the febrile periods of the Presidential campaigns. At 
these times the animosity shown in some of the cartoons seems 
rather surprising, when looked at from the sober vantage 
ground of later years. Political molehills were exaggerated 
into mountains, and even those elements of vulgar vitupera- 




GULLIVER CRISI'I. 

From "II Papagallo " (Rome). 

tion and cheap personal abuse — features of political cam- 
paigns which we are happily outgrowing — were eagerly 
seized upon for the purpose of pictorial satire. The peculiar 
bitterness which marked the memorable campaign between 
Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Blaine in 1884 was strongly 
mirrored in the political caricature of the time. It marked 
the highwater line of the element of purely personal abuse 
in comic art. In the end the extreme measures to which each 



234 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 







Fig. 291. — Caricature de Gill, {ticlipse, 19 octobre 1873.) 

of the rival parties resorted during that year had very- 
beneficial effects, for after the election the nation, in calmer 
mood, grew ashamed at the thought of its violence and 
bitterness, and subsequent campaigns have consequently been 
much more free from these objectionable features. Mr. 
Harrison, Mr. Bryan, Mr. McKinley, and Mr. Roosevelt 
have all been assailed from many different points. But we 
are no longer in the mood to tolerate attempts to rake up 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 235 

alleged personal scandals and to use them in the pamphlet 
and the cartoon. Enough of this was done by both parties 
in 1884 t° last us for at least a generation. There are car- 
toons which appeared in Puck and Judge which even at this 
day we should not think of reprinting, and which the publica- 
tions containing them and the artists who drew them would 
probably like to forget. 

Nevertheless, to the close student of political history there 
is in the American cartoon of this period, with all its flam- 
boyant colorings, its reckless exaggeration, its puerile 
animosity, material which the more sober and dignified Brit- 
ish cartoon does not offer. It does not sum up so adequately 
the sober second thought of the nation, but it does keep us in 
touch with the changing mood of popular opinion, its varying 
pulse-beat from hour to hour. To glance over the old files 
throughout any one of the Presidential campaigns is the next 
best thing to living them over again, listening once more to 
the daily heated arguments, the inflammable stump speeches, 
the rancorous vituperation which meant so much at the time, 
and which seemed so idle the day after the election. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE THIRD FRENCH REPUBLIC 

IT is not strange that during these years American car- 
toonists concerned themselves but little with matters 
outside of their own country. For more than a decade 
after the close of the Franco-Prussian War there were very 
few episodes which assumed international importance, and 
still fewer in which the United States had any personal in- 
terest. France was amply occupied in recovering from the 
effects of her exhaustive struggle; United Germany was un- 
dergoing the process of crystallizing into definite form. Eu- 
rope, as a whole, had no more energy than was needed to at- 
tend to domestic affairs and to keeping a jealous eye upon Eng- 
lish ambition in Egypt and Russian aggression in the Balkan 
States. For some little time after the French Commune 
echoes of that internecine struggle were still to be found in 
the work of caricaturists, both in France and Germany. 
Before taking final leave of that veteran French artist, 
Honore Daumier, it seems necessary to allude briefly to a few 
of the cartoons of that splendidly tragic series of his old age 
dealing with the France which, having undergone the horrors 
of the Germanic invasion and of the Commune, is shattered 
but not broken, and begins to look forward with wistful eyes 
to a time when she shall have recovered her strength and her 
prosperity. One of the most striking of these cartoons rep- 
resents France as a deep-rooted tree which has been bent and 
rent by the passing whirlwind. "Poor France! The 
branches are broken, but the trunk holds always." Simple as 

236 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



237 







ly 




"poor France! the branches are broken, but the trunk still holds.' 
By Daumier in " Charivari." 

the design is, the artist by countless touches of light and of 
shadow has given it a somber significance which long remains 
in the memory. It was to Napoleon that Daumier bitterly 
ascribed the misfortunes of La Patrie, and in these cartoons 
he lost no opportunity of attacking Napoleonic legend. 
Stark and dead, nailed to the Book of History is the Imperial 
eagle. " You will remain outside, nailed fast on the cover, 



2 3 8 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



a hideous warning to future generations of Frenchmen," is 
Daumier's moral. Of brighter nature is the cartoon called 




" You shall stay there, nailed to the cover, a 
warning to future generations of Frenchmen." 

Bv Daumier in " Charivari." 

" The New Year." It represents the dawning of 1872, and 
portrays France sweeping away the last broken relics of her 
period of disaster. 

In Germany, also, one finds a few tardy cartoons bearing 
upon Napoleon III. Even in the Fliegende Blatter, a 
periodical which throughout its history has confined itself, 
with few exceptions, to social satire, perennial skits upon the 
dignified Herr Professor, the self-important young lieuten- 
ant, the punctilious university student, one famous cartoon 
appeared late in the year 1871, entitled "The Root of All 
Evil." It portrayed Napoleon III., as a gigantic, distorted 
vegetable of the carrot or turnip order, his flabby features 
distended into tuberous rotundity, the familiar hall-mark of 
his sweeping mustache and imperial lengthened grotesquely 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



239 



into the semblance of a threefold root. Still better known 
is a series of cartoons which ran through half a dozen num- 
bers of the FBegende Blatter, entitled " The Franco-Prussian 
War: A Tragedy in Five Acts," in which the captions are all 
clever applications of lines from Schiller's "Maid of Orleans. 
As compared with the work of really great cartoonists, this 
series has little to make it memorable. But as an expression 
of a victorious nation's good-natured contempt, its tendency 




THE NEW YEAR BRINGS NEW HOPE FOR FRANCE. 

By Daumier in " Charivari." 

to view the whole fierce struggle of 1870-71 as an amusing 
farce enacted by a company of grotesque marionettes, it is 
not without significance and interest. 

Almost as Germanic in sentiment and in execution as the 
" Maid of Orleans " series in the Fliegende Blatter was the 
curious little volume entitled " The Fight at Dame Europa's 
School," written and illustrated by Thomas Nast. This skit, 
which was printed in New York after the close of the War, 






240 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



contained thirty-three drawings which are remarkable chiefly 
in that they are comparatively different from anything else 
that Nast ever did and bear a striking resemblance to the 
war cartoons of the German papers. The Louis Napoleon 
of this book is so much like the Louis Napoleon of the 
Fliegende Blatter that one is bound to feel that one was the 




THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. 

From the " Fliegende Blatter" in iSyi. 




^he whole spirit of these pictures, which appeared in the Fliegende Blatter after 
Napoleonic downfall in 1871, is a travesty on the splendid lines of Schiller in the 
laid of Orleans " (Jungfrau von Orleans). 



242 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

direct inspiration of the other. The text of the book, 
though nothing astonishing, serves its purpose in elucidating 
the drawings. It tells of the well-ordered educational es- 
tablishment kept by Dame Europa in which the five largest 
boys acted as monitors, to keep the unruly pupils in order. 
These boys were Louis, William, Aleck, Joseph, and John. 
If a dispute arose among any of the smaller boys, the mon- 
itors had to examine into its cause, and, if possible, to settle it 
amicably. Should it be necessary to fight the matter out, 
they were to see fair play, stop the encounter when it had 
gone far enough, and at all times to uphold justice, and to 
prevent tyranny and bullying. In this work Master Louis 
and Master John were particularly prominent. There was 
a tradition in the school of a terrific row in times past, when 
a monitor named Nicholas attacked a very dirty little boy 
called Constantine. John and Louis pitched in, and gave 
Nicholas such a thrashing that he never got over it, and soon 
afterward left the school. Now each of the upper boys had 
a little garden of his own in which he took great pride and 
interest. In the center of each garden there was an arbor, 
fitted up according to the taste and means of its owner. 
Louis had the prettiest arbor of all, while that of John was a 
mere tool-house. When the latter wished to enjoy a holiday 
he would punt himself across the brook and enjoy himself 
in the arbor of his friend Louis. By the side of Louis's 
domain was that of William, who, though proud of his own 
garden, never went to work in it without casting an envious 
glance on two little flower beds which now belonged to Louis, 
but which ought by rights he thought to belong to him. 
Over these flower beds he often talked with his favorite fag, 
a shrewd lad named Mark, full of deep tricks and dodges. 
" There is only one way to do it," said Mark. " If you 




Fig. 294. — La situation politique en France. (NoveTnbre 1873.) 
Caricature do Felii Regamey, publiec dans le Harper's Wceklcj de New -York. 



244 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

want the flower beds, you must fight Louis for them, and 
I believe you will lick him all to smash; but you must fight 
him alone." 

" How do you mean? " replied William. 

" I mean, you must take care that the other monitors don't 
interfere in the quarrel. If they do, they will be sure to go 
against you. Remember what a grudge Joseph owes you 
for the licking you gave him not along ago; and Aleck, 
though to be sure Louis took little Constantine's part against 
him in that great bullying row, is evidently beginning to grow 
jealous of your influence in the school. You see, old fellow, 
you have grown so much lately, and filled out so wonderfully 
that you are getting really quite formidable. Why, I 
recollect the time when you were quite a little chap ! " 

Thereupon the astute Mark designs a plan by which 
William may provoke the encounter while making Louis 
seem the aggressor. And so on, under the guise of fist- 
fight between two schoolboys, Nast tells of all the events of 
the struggle of 1 871 ; the outbreak of hostilities, the Baptism 
of Fire, Sedan, the German march on Paris, the Siege, and 
the different attitudes assumed by the other monitors. 






CHAPTER XXV 



GENERAL EUROPEAN AFFAIRS 



PUNCH, however, is really the most satisfactory and 
comprehensive source for the history of political 
caricature during the years following the siege of 
Paris down to 1886. From the indefatigable pencil of 
Tenniel and Sambourne we get an exhaustive and pungent 
record of the whole period of Disraeli's ascendency, the fruits 




"NEW CROWNS FOR OLD." 

Disraeli offering Victoria the Imperial crown 
of India. 

of his much-criticised foreign policy, England's attitude 
regarding the Suez Canal, her share in the Turco-Russian 

245 



246 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



conflict, her acquisition of the island of Cyprus, the faH of 
Khartoum, the Fenian difficulties of 1885, and the history of 
Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule policy. 

Throughout the cartoons of this period there is no one 
figure which appears with more persistent regularity than 




" TIGHTENING THE GRIP." 

that of Lord Beaconsfield, and with scarcely an exception he 
is uniformly treated with an air of indulgent contempt. Of 
course, his strongly marked features, the unmistakably 
Semitic cast of nose and lips, the closely curled black ringlets 
clustering above his ears, all offered irresistible temptation 
to the cartoonist, with the result that throughout the entire 
series, in whatever guise he is portrayed, the suggestion of 
charlatan, of necromancer, of mountebank, of one kind or 
another of the endless genus " fake," is never wholly absent. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 247 

Even in Tenniel's cartoon, " New Crowns for Old," 
which commemorates the passage of the Royal Titles Bill, 
conferring upon the Queen the title of Empress of India, the 
scene is confessedly adapted from Aladdin, and " Dizzy " is 
portrayed as a slippery Oriental with an oily smile, in the 
act of trading a gaudy-looking piece of tinsel headgear for 
the more modest, but genuine, regal crown topped with the 
cross of Malta. The bestowal of the title of Earl of Beacons- 
field upon Mr. Disraeli, which followed within a very few 
weeks, was too good a chance for satire for Mr. Tenniel to 
let pass, and he hit it off in a page entitled " One Good Turn 
Deserves Another," in which Victoria, with the Imperial 
crown of India upon her head, is conferring a coronet upon 
" Dizzy," kneeling obsequiously at her feet. 

At this time the one international question which bade fair 
to assume any considerable importance was that of Russia's 
attitude in the Balkan peninsula. Already in June, 1886, 




^X)LUS — RULER OF THE STORMS. THE EASTERLY 
WIND TOO MUCH FOR BISMARCK. 

we find Punch portraying the Czar of Russia as a master of 
the hounds, just ready to let slip the leash from his " dogs of 
war," Servia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, in pur- 



248 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



suit of the unsuspecting Sultan of Turkey, while John Bull 
in the guise of a policeman, is cautiously peering from behind 
a fence, evidently wondering whether this is a case which calls 
for active interference. It is only a few days later that the 




" l'etat c'est moi ! " 

outbreak of an insurrection in Bosnia and Herzegovina 
hastens a decision on the part of Europe to " keep the Ring " 
and let the Sultan ward off the " dogs of war " single-handed 
— an incident duly commemorated in Punch on June 19. 
The Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria, however, aroused public 
sentiment throughout the Continent to such a degree that the 
Powers united in demanding an armistice. Tenniel's interpre- 
tation of this incident takes the form of a sick-chamber, in 
which the Sick Man of Europe is surrounded by a corps of 
illustrious physicians, Drs. Bull, William I., Francis Joseph 
and Company, who are firmly insisting that their patient shall 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 249 

swallow a huge pill labeled " Armistice " — " or else there's 
no knowing what might happen ! " The protocol on Turk- 
ish affairs which soon after this was proposed by Russia and 
supported by Disraeli, forms the subject of two suggestive 
cartoons in Punch. The first, entitled " Pons Asinorum," 
depicts the protocol as a make-shift bridge supported on the 
docile shoulders of John Bull and the other European Pow- 
ers, and spanning a lagoon entitled " Eastern Question." 




THE HIDDEN HAND. 



Over this bridge the Russian bear is stealthily crawling to 
his desired goal, his eye half closed in a sly wink, 
his sides bristling like a veritable arsenal with 
weapons. The second cartoon, alluding to the Porte's re- 
jection of the protocol, represents Disraeli looking discon- 
solately upon a smoldering pile of powder kegs and ammu- 



250 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



nition, over which he has placed the protocol, twisted into 
the shape of a candle-snuffer. " Confound the thing! It 
is all ablaze ! " he ejaculates, while Lord Hartington re- 
minds him, " Ah, my dear D., paper will burn, you know ! " 

The next significant caricature in the Punch series belongs 
to the period of actual hostilities between Turkey and Rus- 
sia, after Plevna had been completely invested and the Turks 
were at all points being steadily beaten back. This carica- 
ture, entitled " Tightening the Grip," showing the strug- 
gling Turk being slowly crushed to death in the relentless 







THE IRISH FRANKENSTEIN. 



hug of the gigantic bear, may safely be left to speak for 
itself without further description. Meanwhile, England 
was watching with growing disquiet Russia's actions in the 
Balkans. In one cartoon of this period, Mr. Bull is bluntly 
refusing to be drawn into a game of " Blind Hookey " with 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



251 



the other European Powers. " Now then, Mr. Bull, we're 
only waiting for you," says Russia; and John Bull rejoins: 
" Thank you, I don't like the game. I like to see the cards ! " 
Prince Bismarck at this time was doing his best to bring about 
an understanding between England and Russia, but the dif- 
ficulties of the situation threatened to prove too much even 
for that veteran diplomat. Punch cleverly hit off the situa- 
tion by representing Bismarck as yEolus, the wind-god, strug- 
gling desperately with an unmanageable wind-bag, which is 
swelling threateningly in the direction of the East and assum- 
ing the form of a dangerous war-cloud. Eventually all mis- 
understandings were peacefully smoothed away at the Berlin 
Congress, which Tenniel commemorates with a cartoon show- 
ing " Dizzy " in the guise of a tight-rope performer tri- 
umphantly carrying the Sultan on his shoulders along a rope 
labeled " Congress," his inherent double-dealing being sug- 




THE DARING DUCKLING 



JUNE, Ii 

An early appearance of Mr. Chamberlain in 
caricature. 

gested by his balancing pole, which he sways back and forth 
indifferently, and the opposite ends of which are labeled 
" peace " and " war." 

Comparatively few cartoons of this period touch upon 



252 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



American matters. All the more noteworthy is the one 
which Mr. Tenniel dedicated to the memory of President 
Garfield at the time of the latter's assassination. It is a 
worthy example of the artist's most serious manner, at once 
dignified and impressive. It bears the inscription, " A Com- 
mon Sorrow," and shows a weeping Columbia clasped closely 
in the arms of a sorrowing and sympathetic Britannia. 




SETTLING THE ALABAMA CLAIMS. 



M. Gambetta seldom received attention at the hands of 
English caricaturists; but in 1881, when the resignation of 
Jules Ferry and his colleagues resulted in the formation of a 
new ministry with Gambetta at the head, and both English 
and German newspapers were sarcastically saying that " the 
Gambetta Cabinet represented only himself," Punch had to 
have his little fling at the French statesman, portraying him 
as beaming with self-complacence, and striking an attitude 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



253 



in front of a statue of Louis XIV., while he echoes the latter's 
famous dictum, " L'Etat c'est moi ! " 

Two cartoons which tell their own story are devoted to 
Fenianism. The first commemorates the Phoenix Park out- 
rage in which Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed 
Chief Secretary, lost his life. The cartoon is called " The 
Irish Frankenstein," and is certainly baleful enough to do full 




" MIRAGE!- 

GORDON WAITING AT KHARTOUM. 



justice to the hideousness of the crime it is intended to sym- 
bolize. The second cartoon, entitled " The Hidden Hand," 
shows the Fenian monster receiving a bag of gold from a 
mysterious hand stretched from behind a curtain. The refer- 
ence is to a supposed inner circle of assassins, directed and 
paid by greater villains who kept themselves carefully be- 
hind the scenes. 

The tragedy of Khartoum formed the subject of several 



254 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

grim and forceful pages. " Mirage " was almost prophetic 
in its conception, representing General Gordon gazing across 
the desert, where, by the tantalizing refraction of the air, he 
can plainly see the advancing British hosts, which in reality 
are destined to arrive too late. " Too late," in fact, are the 
very words which serve as a caption of the next cartoon. 
Khartoum has fallen, and Britannia, having come upon a 
fruitless mission, stands a picture of despair, her face buried 
upon her arm, her useless shield lying neglected upon the 
ground. _ 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THOMAS NAST 

IT was not until late in the '6o's, when Thomas Nast 
began his pictorial campaign in the pages of Harper's 
Weekly against the Ring which held New York in its 
clutches, that American caricature could claim a pencil which 
entitled it to any sort of consideration from the artistic point 
of view. Some of the cartoons which have been reproduced 
in earlier papers of this series have possessed unquestionable 
cleverness of invention and idea; for instance, many of those 
dealing with President Jackson's administration and his re- 
lations with the United States Bank, and some of the purely 
allegorical cartoons treating of slavery and of the Civil War. 
But in all these there was so much lacking; so many artistic 
shortcomings were covered up by the convenient loops. The 
artists felt themselves free from any obligation to give ex- 
pression to the countenances of their subjects so long as the 
fundamental idea was there, and the loops offered an easy 
vehicle for the utterance of thoughts and feelings which a 
modern artist would feel obliged to express in the drawing 
itself — by a skillful quirk of the pencil, an added line, an 
exaggerated smile or frown. It was a thoroughly wooden 
school of caricature, in which one can find no trace of the 
splendid suggestion which the caricaturists should at that 
time have been drawing from contemporary masters of the 
art in France and England. 

Although during the years of his fecundity Thomas Nast 
drew many cartoons bearing on events of international im- 

255 



256 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



portance, his name will always be remembered, first of all, 
in connection with the series through which he held up the 
extravagances and iniquities of the Tweed Ring in the pillory 
of public opinion. He had decided convictions on other sub- 
jects. To the end of his life it was his nature to feel in- 
tensely, even in small matters. But his scorn and hatred of 
the corrupt organization that was looting New York became 
a positive mania, which was reflected in the cartoons which 
he literally hurled week after week against Tweed and his 
satellites. " I don't care what they write about me," said 

IIT7K 




THE GRATZ BROWN TAG TO GREELEY'S COAT. 

Tweed, " but can't you stop those terrible cartoons? " and in 
the end they, more than anything else, led to his downfall, 
his flight and his capture in Spain, where he was recognized 




THOMAS NAST. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 259 

by the police through the likeness Nast had drawn of him as 
a kidnaper. But in recognizing Nast's services in behalf 
of New York City it is not fair to overlook his work as a 



+*f* iA ) M-7-/J7?. 



w 



3U- 




FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE CAP AND DINNER PAIL 
AS EMBLEMATIC OF LABOR. 

political caricaturist on broader issues. To him we owe also 
the Gratz Brown tag to Greeley's coat in the campaign of 
1872, the " Rag Baby of Inflation," the Jackass as emblem- W 
atic of the Democratic Party, the Labor Cap and the Full 
Dinner Pail, which in later years were so much developed 
by the cartoonists of Judge. And if to-day, at the beginning of 
the twentieth century, we have a school of caricature which 
for scope and craftsmanship is equal, if not superior, to that 
of any nation of Europe, it is only just to recognize that it 
was Thomas Nast who first gave American caricature a dig- 
nity and a meaning. 



260 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



The earliest Presidential election which falls within the 
scope of the present chapter, that of 1872, antedates the es- 
tablishment of American comic weeklies. The central figure 
in the few caricatures which have survived from that year 
was, of course, Horace Greeley, whose candidacy at one time 
was thought seriously to threaten the fortunes of the Repub- 
lican Party. The caricatures themselves, with the exception 
of those drawn by Thomas Nast, show little improvement 
over the caricatures which were executed during the Civil 
War. The artists relied entirely upon the traditional loops 
to make them intelligible to the public, and the features of 
the political characters portrayed were expressionless and 
wooden. One of the best of this series was drawn in support 
of the Horace Greeley candidacy. Uncle Sam is represented 
as a landlord and President Grant as his tenant, a shiftless 




18/r. 



THE FIRST "RAG BABY." 

widow with a dog at her heels and a bottle of rum in the 
basket on her arm. The Widow Grant has come to ask for 
a new lease. " Well, Uncle Sam," she says, " I've called to 
see if you will let me have the White House for four years 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



261 



longer, as I find the place suits me very well." " No, Marm 
Grant," retorts Uncle Sam, shaking his head, " I reckon I'll 
do no such thing. I've had too many complaints about you 
from the neighbors during the last four years. I'm just sick 
of you and your tobacco smoke and bull pups, so I've given 




THE DONKEY. FIRST USED TO RIDICULE THE IN- 
FLATION TENDENCY. 

the lease to Honest Horace Greeley, who will take better care 
of the place than you have." 

In another of this series Horace Greeley is represented as 
the entering wedge that is splitting the rock of the Republican 
Party. Greeley, with a paper bearing the words " Free 
Trade " in one hand and one bearing " Protection " in the 
other, is being hammered into the cleft in the Republican 
rock by a huge mallet — Democratic Nomination — wielded 
by Carl Schurz. " This is rather a novel position for a 
stanch old Republican like me," he says. " I begin to feel 
as if I was in a tight place." President Grant, with a cigar 
in his hand, is looking on complacently. " My friend," he 



262 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

calls out to Schurz, " you've got a soft thing on your wedge, 
but your mallet will kill the man." To which Schurz re- 
plies: " I don't care who's killed, if we succeed in defeating 
your election." Below, creeping furtively about the rock, are 
the figures of Dana, Sumner, Gratz Brown, Trumbull, Hall, 
Sweeny, Tweed, and Hoffman of the Ring. " Anything to 
beat Grant! " is the cry of these conspirators. " Honesty is 
the word to shout, there are so many rogues about," mutters 
Tweed. " Oh, how freely we'll win with Greeley," says 
Hall. " Anything to beat Grant. He wouldn't make me 
Collector for New York," are the words of Dana. The car- 
toon is a belated specimen of the school of American cari- 
cature which was in vogue in the days of President Jackson. 
As has already been stated, Puck was not founded until 
1877, too late to take part in the Tilden-Hayes campaign. 
When we speak of Puck, however, we refer, of course, to the 




THE BRAINS OF TAMMANY. 



edition printed in English, for, as a matter of fact, twenty- 
four numbers of a German Puck were published during the 
year 1876. 

As that year was an important one in American history, 
these numbers can by no means be ignored, and despite their 



264 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



crude appearance when contrasted with the Puck of later 
days, they contain some of Keppler's most admirable work. 
For instance, there is the figure of the tattooed Columbia, the 
precursor of Gillam's famous Tattooed Man. This figure ap- 




Colnmliia ■ tl-.' :■• ';:>— ! ■■ ■■■ a ■-' -JfeiM-hniniertjaiiiim MHntmiilMf5»h<i taidiiiiHiiii ru Snin jutba. 



THE TATTOOED COLUMBIA. 
By courtesy of the Puck Company. 



peared in November, 1876, and was the idea of Charles Hau- 
ser, a member of the first editorial staff of the young weekly. 
The artist's idea of the unhappy condition of our nation is 
shown in the hideous tattooed designs with which Columbia's 
body is scarred from head to foot. We can read " Whisky 
Ring," " Black Friday," " Secession," " Tammany," " Elec- 
tion Frauds," "Corruption," "Civil War," "Credit 
Mobilier," and " Taxes." The figure is as repulsive as that 
which eight years later drove Mr. Blaine to frenzy. 



■<& 







266 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




By courtesy of the Puck Company. 

A familiar device in the caricature of the later '70's was 
that of representing political figures as being headless and 
placing their heads in another part of the picture, so that 
you might adjust them to suit yourself. In this way the artist 
did not commit himself to prophecy and was enabled to please 
both parties. For instance, an excellent example of this is 
shown in the cartoon called " You Pays Your Money and 
You Takes Your Choice," drawn by Keppler during the 




^ 



268 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



campaign of 1876. Of the two headless figures one is seated 
in the window of the White House gesticulating derisively 
at his beaten opponent. The other, thoroughly crushed and 
with a nose of frightfully exaggerated length — both Mr. 
Tilden and Mr. Hayes were rather large-nosed men — is 
leaning helplessly against the wall of the cold outside. At 
the bottom of the picture are the heads of the two candidates, 
which one might cut out and adjust as pleased himself. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS OF l88o AND 1 8 84 

PROBABLY no cartoon dealing with the Garfield- 
Hancock campaign of 1880 was more widely dis- 
cussed than that called " Forbidding the Banns," 
drawn for Puck by Keppler. It was a cartoon which an 
American comic paper would publish to-day only after con- 
siderable hesitation, for there was in it the spirit of a less 
delicate age, a coarseness which was pardonable only when 
the genuine strength and humor of the complete work are 
taken into consideration. " Forbidding the Banns" shows a 
political wedding party at the altar with Uncle Sam as the 
reluctant and uncomfortable groom, General Garfield as the 
eager bride, and the figure of the ballot box as the officiating 
clergyman. The bridesmaids are Mr. Whitelaw Reid and 
Carl Schurz, with Murat Halstead bringing up the rear. 
The ceremony is well along and the contracting parties 
are about to be united when W. H. Barnum, the chair- 
man of the Democratic National Committee, rushes in 
shouting, " I forbid the banns! " and waving frantically the 
figure of a little baby marked " Credit Mobilier." The 
faces of all the bridal party show consternation at the unex- 
pected interruption, while the bride protests coyly: "But it 
was such a little one." 

The defeat of General Hancock in 1880 was commem- 
orated by Keppler in Puck with the cartoon called " The 
Wake over the Remains of the Democratic Party." The 
ludicrous corpse of the defunct is stretched on a rough board 

269 




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$ 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 271 

and covered with a loose sheet. The lighted candles at the 
four corners protrude from the necks of bottles, and the 
mourners are indulging in a protracted carouse which seems 
destined to end in a free fight. In the center of the picture 
Kelly, with Ben Butler as a partner, is doing a dance in the 
most approved manner of Donnybrook Fair. All about there 
is the general atmosphere of turmoil and unnatural excite- 
ment, but the figures of Hewitt, Davis, Belmont, and English 
are stretched out in a manner indicating that the festivities 
of the night have proved too much for them. 

As has already been pointed out, the political caricature 
commemorating the Cleveland-Blaine campaign of 1884 
was chiefly remarkable for its extraordinary rancor. There 
was little, if any, really good-natured satire underlying these 
cartoons; they were designed and executed vindictively, and 
their main object was to hurt. Mr. Cleveland's official 
record in Buffalo, and as Governor of New York, had been 
such as to cause many of the more liberal Republicans to sup- 
port his candidacy and offered little to the political cartoonist, 
so the opponents of Republican caricature found it expedient 
to base their attacks on matters of purely personal nature. 

Even in later years the cartoonist did not entirely refrain 
from this method of belittling Mr. Cleveland's capabilities. 
It was sneeringly said that much of the success of his ad- 
ministration was due to the charm, the tact, and the personal 
magnetism of Mrs. Cleveland, and this idea was the inspira- 
tion of a number of cartoons which were far from being in 
the best of taste. One of these which was not particularly 
offensive was that entitled " Mr. Cleveland's Best Card." It 
was simply a huge playing card bearing the picture of Mrs. 
Cleveland. Another much more obnoxious was a curious 
imitation of the famous French cartoon " Partant pour la 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



273 




A COMMON SORROW. 



Syrie," which was published in Paris after the flight of the 
Empress Eugenie. 

The Democratic cartoonists, besides their use of the Tat- 
tooed Man idea and the alleged scandals in Mr. Blaine's 
political career, made a strong point of the soundness and 
cleanness of Mr. Cleveland's official record. A typical cari- 
cature of this nature was that drawn by Gillam called " Why 
They Dislike Him." It represents Mr. Cleveland as a lion 
lying on the rock of Civil Service Reform. Perched on the 
limb of a tree overhead are a group of chattering monkeys, 
his political enemies, who are hurling at him imprecations 
and abuse because he will not consent to serve as the cats- 
paw to pluck the chestnuts for them out of the political fire. 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 277 

Familiar faces among the group of noisy bandar-log are those 
of Croker, Butler, and Dana. Prostrate and helpless under 
the paw of the lion is a monkey with the face of Grady. 

The most terrible and effective series of cartoons published 
during the Cleveland-Blaine campaign was that in which the 
Republican candidate appeared as the Tattooed Man in the 
political show. For many weeks during the summer and 
autumn of 1884 Mr. Blaine was assailed through this figure 
in the pages of Puck. The story of the origin of this his- 
toric cartoon is as follows : Mr. Bernard Gillam, the artist, 
had conceived the idea of a cartoon in which each of the 
Presidential possibilities should appear as some sort of freak 
in a political side-show. One of these freaks was to be the 
Tattooed Man, but Mr. Gillam at first hit upon David 
Davis as the person to be so represented. He was describing 
the proposed cartoon one day in the office of Puck when Mr. 
Bunner, who was at that time the editor, turned suddenly 
and said: "David Davis? Nonsense! Blaine is the man 
for that." The cartoon so conceived was splendidly exe- 
cuted, and became one of the great pictorial factors in turn- 
ing the scale of the election. It stirred Mr. Blaine himself 
to a point where he resolved to prosecute the publishers of 
Puck, and was persuaded from this course only by the very 
strongest pressure. The tattoo marks which were most ob- 
noxious to him were those which spelled out the word " Bri- 
bery." A curious feature of this series was that Mr. Bernard 
Gillam was an ardent Republican, voting for Mr. Blaine on 
v election day, and at the same time that he was executing 
the Tattooed Man cartoon in Puck was suggesting equally 
vindictive caricatures of Mr. Cleveland and the Democratic 
party for the rival pages of Judge. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE INFLUENCE OF JOURNALISM 

IN looking backward over a century of caricature, it is 
interesting to ask just what it is that makes the radical 
difference between the cartoon of to-day and that of 
a hundred years ago. That there is a wide gulf between the 
comparative restraint of the modern cartoonist and the un- 
bridled license of Gillray's or Rowlandson's grotesque, gar- 
goyle types, is self-evident; that comic art, as applied to 
politics, is to-day more widespread, more generally appre- 
ciated, and in a quiet way more effective in molding public 
opinion than ever before, needs no argument. And yet, if 
one stops to analyze the individual cartoons, to take them 
apart and discover the essence of their humor, the incisive 
edge of their irony and satire, one finds that there is nothing 
really new in them; that the basic principles of caricature 
were all understood as well in the eighteenth century as in 
the nineteenth, and that, in many cases, the successful cartoon 
of to-day is simply the replica of an old one of a past genera- 
tion, modified to fit a new set of facts. When Gilbert Stuart 
drew his famous " Gerrymander " cartoon, he was probably 
not the first artist to avail himself of the chance resemblance 
of the geographical contour of a state or country to some 
person or animal. He certainly was not the last. Again and 
again the map of the United States has been drawn so as to 
bring out some significant similarity, as recently when it was 
distorted into a ludicrous semblance of Mr. Cleveland, bend- 
ing low in proud humility, the living embodiment of the 

278 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



279 










A GERMAN IDEA OF IRISH HOME RULE. 



principle, L'Etat c 'est Moi; or again, just before our war 
with Spain, when it was so drawn as to present a capital like- 
ness of Uncle Sam, the Atlantic and Gulf States forming 
his nose and mouth, the latter suggestively opened to take 
in Cuba, which is swimming dangerously near. Puck's 
famous " Tattooed Man " was only a new application of an 
idea that had been used before; while the representation of a 
group of leading politicians as members of a freak show, a 
circus, or a minstrel troop, is as old as minstrels or dime 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



281 



museums themselves. Few leading statesmen of the past 
half century have not at some time in their career been por- 
trayed as Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Richard III. ; while as 
for the conventional use of animals and symbolic figures to 
represent the different nations, the British Lion and the 
Russian Bear, Uncle Sam and French Liberty, these belong 
to the raw materials of caricature, dating back to its very in- 
ception as an art. And yet, while the means used are essen- 
tially the same as in the days of Hogarth and Cruikshank, 
the results are radically different. 

The reason for this difference may be summed up in a 
single word — Journalism. The modern cartoon is essen- 
tially journalistic, both in spirit and in execution. The spas- 
modic single sheets of Gillray's period, huge lithographs that 




HORATIUS CLEVELAND AT THE BRIDGE. 
Fi-om New York "Life." 

found their way to the public through the medium of London 
print shops, were long ago replaced by the weekly comic 
papers, while to-day these in turn find formidable rivals in 
the cartoons which have become a feature of most of the lead- 



282 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



ing daily journals. The celerity with which a caricature is 
now conceived and executed, thanks to the modern mechan- 
ical improvements and the prevailing spirit of alertness, 
makes it possible for the cartoonist to keep pace with the 
news of the day, to seize upon the latest political blunder, the 
social fad of the moment, and hit it off with a stroke of in- 
cisive irony, without fear that it will be forgotten before the 




BERNARD GILLAM OF "JUDGE." 

drawing can appear in print. The consequences of all this 
modern haste and enterprise are not wholly advantageous. 
Real talent is often wasted upon mediocre ideas under the 
compulsion of producing a daily cartoon, and again a really 
brilliant conception is marred by overhaste in execution, a 
lack of artistic finish in the detail. Besides, the tendency of a 
large part of contemporary cartoons is toward the local and 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



283 




JOSEPH KEPPI.ER OF "PUCK. 



the ephemeral. This is especially true of the caricatures 
which appear during an American political campaign, in 
which every petty blunder, every local issue, every bit of per- 
sonal gossip, is magnified into a vital national principle, a 
world-wide scandal. And when the morning after the elec- 
tion dawns, the business settles down into its wonted channel, 
these momentous issues, and the flamboyant cartoons which 
proclaimed them, suddenly become as trivial and as empty as 
a spent firecracker or Roman candle. 

But another change which the spirit of journalism has 
wrought in the contemporary cartoon, and a more vital 
change than any other, is due to the definite editorial policy 
which lies behind it. The dominant note in all the work of 
the great cartoonists of the past, in the English Gillray and 



284 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

the French Daumier, was the note of individualism. Take 
away the personal rancor, the almost irrational hatred of 
" Little Boney " from Gillray, take away Daumier's mordant 
irony, his fearless contempt for Louis Philippe, and the life 
of their work is gone. The typical cartoon of to-day is, to a 
large extent, not a one-man production at all. It is fre- 
quently built up, piecemeal, one detail at a time, and in the 
case of a journal like Punch or Judge or Life often represents 
the thoughtful collaboration of the entire staff. In the case 
of the leading dailies, the cartoon must be in accord with the 
settled political policy of the paper, as much as the leading 
articles on the editorial page. The individual preferences 
of the cartoonist do not count. In fact, he may be doing 
daily violence to his settled convictions, or he may find means 
of espousing both sides at once, as was the case with Mr. 
Gillam, who throughout the Cleveland-Blaine campaign 
was impartially drawing Democratic cartoons for Puck and 
suggesting Republican cartoons for Judge at the same time. 

What the political cartoon will become in the future, it is 
dangerous to predict. There is, however, every indication 
that its influence, instead of diminishing, is likely to increase 
steadily. What it has lost in ceasing to be the expression of 
the individual mind, the impulsive product of erratic genius, 
it has more than gained in its increased timeliness, its greater 
sobriety, its more sustained and definite purpose. At 
certain epochs in the past it has served as a vehicle 
for reckless scandal-mongering and scurrilous personal 
abuse. But this it seems to have happily outgrown. 
That pictorial satire may be made forceful without the sacri- 
fice of dignity was long ago demonstrated by Tenniel's pow- 
erful work in the pages of Punch. And there is no doubt 
that a serious political issue, when presented in the form of 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 285 

a telling cartoon, will be borne home to the minds of a far 
larger circle of average every-day men and women than it 
ever could be when discussed in the cold black and white of 
the editorial column. 

Another interesting effect of the growing conservative 
spirit in caricature is seen in the gradual crystallization of 
certain definite symbolic types. Allusion has already been 




THE JOHN BULL OCTOPUS IN EGYPT. 

From " // Pafagallo " {Rome). 

made, in earlier chapters of this work, to the manner in 
which the conception of John Bull and Uncle Sam and other 
analogous types, has been gradually built up by almost imper- 
ceptible degrees, each artist preserving all the essential work 
of his predecessor, and adding a certain indefinable some- 
thing of his own, until a certain definite portrait has been pro- 
duced, a permanent ideal, whose characteristic features the 



286 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



cartoonists of the future could no more alter arbitrarily than 
they could the features of Bismarck or Gladstone. And not 
only have these crystallized types become accepted by the 
nation at large, — not only is Uncle Sam the same familiar 
figure, tall and lanky, from the New York Puck to the San 
Francisco Wasp, — but gradually these national types have 
migrated and crossed the seas, and to-day they are the com- 




&z&J'-* 



A HAND AGAINST EVERY MAN. 
Fro?n London '■'■Judy, 1 ' April ij, 18Q2. 



mon property of comic artists of all nations. John Bull and 
the Russian Bear, Columbia and the American Eagle, are 
essentially the same, whether we meet them in the press of 
Canada, Australia, Cape Colony, or the United States. And 
for the very reason that there is so little variety in the obvious 
features, the mere physical contour, the subtler differences 
due to race prejudice and individual limitations are all the 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



287 




THE STABILITY OF THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE. 
From " // Papagallo" (Rome). 

more significant and interesting. There are cases, and com- 
paratively recent cases, too, where race-prejudice has found 
expression in such rampant and illogical violence as prompted 
many of the Spanish cartoons during our recent war over 
Cuba, in which Americans were regularly portrayed as hogs 
— big hogs and little hogs, some in hog-pens, others running 
at large — but one and all of them as hogs. The cartoonists 
of the Continent, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians alike, 
have difficulty in accepting the Anglo-Saxon type of John 
Bull. Instead, they usually portray him as a sort of sad- 
faced travesty upon Lord Dundreary, a tall, lank, much 
bewhiskered " milord," familiar to patrons of Continental 
farce-comedy. But it is not in cases like these that race 
prejudice becomes interesting. There is nothing subtle or 



288 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

suggestive in mere vituperation, whether verbal or pictorial, 
any more than in the persistent representation of a nation 
by a type which is no sense representative. On the other 
hand, the subtle variations of expression in the John Bull of 
contemporary American artists, or the Uncle Sam of British 
caricature, will repay careful study. They form a sort of 
sensitive barometer of public sentiment in the two countries, 
and excepting during the rare periods of exceptional good 
feeling there is always in the Englishman's conception of 
Uncle Sam a scarce-concealed suggestion of crafty malice in 
place of his customary kindly shrewdness, while conversely, 
our portrayal of John Bull is only too apt to convert that 
bluff, honest-hearted country gentleman into a sort of arro- 
gant blusterer, greedy for gain, yet showing the vein of cow- 
ardice distinctive of the born bully. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

YEARS OF TURBULENCE 

IN marked contrast to the preceding lengthy period of 
tranquillity, the closing decade of the nineteenth cen- 
tury witnessed a succession of wars and international 
crises well calculated to stimulate the pencils of every cartoon- 
ist worthy of the name. One has only to recall that to this 
period belong the conflict between China and Japan, the brief 
clash between Greece and Turkey, the beginning of our policy 
of expansion, with the annexation of Hawaii, our own war 
with Spain, and England's protracted struggle in the Trans- 
vaal, to realize how rich in stirring events these few years 
have been, and what opportunities they offer for dramatic 
caricature. 

A cartoon produced in an earlier chapter, entitled 
" Waiting," showed General Gordon gazing anxiously across 
the desert at the mirage which was conjured up by his 
fevered brain, taking the clouds of the horizon to be the 
guns of the approaching British army of relief. Early in 
1885 the relief expedition started under the command of 
General Henry Stewart, and on February 7 there 
was published in Punch the famous cartoon " At Last," 
showing the meeting between Gordon and the relieving 
general. This was a famous Punch slip. That meeting 
never occurred. For on February 5, two days before the 
appearance of the issue containing the cartoon, Khartoum 
had been taken by the Mahdi. The following week Tenniel 
followed up "At Last " with the cartoon " Too Late," which 







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I Punch slip : a cartoon published in Telegram, Thursday Morning Feb 

ticipation of an event which did not 5.—" Khartoum taken by the Mahdi. Gen- 

:ur— viz. ,the meeting of General Gor- eral Gordon's fate uncertain " 
a and General Stewart at Khartoum. 

By Tenniel, February 7, 1S83. By Tenniel, February i 4i ii 




THE LONDON ** TIMES " AND THE SPURIOUS PARNELL LETTERS 



292 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




tenniel's famous cartoon at the time of 
bismarck's retirement. 



showed the Mahdi and his fanatic following pouring into 
Khartoum, while stricken Britannia covers her eyes. 

The Times challenge to Charles Stewart Parnell was, of 
course, recorded in the caricature of Punch. The " Thun- 
derer," it will be remembered, published letters, which it 
believed to be genuine, involving Parnell in the murders of 
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke in Phoenix Park, 
Dublin, in 1882. When these letters were proved to have 
been forged by Pigot, Punch published a cartoon showing 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



293 



the Times doing penance. Both of these cartoons were by 
Tenniel. ' The Challenge " appeared in the issue of April 
30, 1887, and "Penance" almost two years later, March 
9, 1889. 

A cartoon which marked Tenniel's genius at its height, a 
cartoon worthy of being ranked with that which depicted 
the British Lion's vengeance on the Bengal Tiger after the 
atrocities of the Sepoy rebellion, was his famous " Dropping 
the Pilot," which was published on March 29, 1890, after 
William II. of Germany had decided to dispense with the 
services of the Iron Chancellor. Over the side of the ship 




l'enfant terrible. 

The Baccarat Scandal at Tranby Croft in 1891. 

From "Puck." 



294 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



of state the young Emperor is leaning complacently looking 
down on the grim old pilot, who has descended the ladder and 
is about to step into the boat that is to bear him ashore. The 
original sketch of this cartoon was finished by Tenniel as a 




WILLIAM BLUEBEARD. 

" My first two wives are dead. Take care, 
Hohenlohe, lest the same fate overtake you." 
From " La Silhouette''' {Paris). 

commission from Lord Rosebery, who gave it to Bismarck. 
The picture is said to have pleased both the Emperor and the 
Prince. 

The baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft and the subsequent 
trial at which the then Prince of Wales was present as a 
witness was a rich morsel for the caricaturist in the early 
summer of 1891. Not only in England, but on the Con- 
tinent and in this country, the press was full of jibes and 
banter at the Prince's expense. The German comic paper, 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



295 



Ulk, suggested pictorially a new coat-of-arms for his Royal 
Highness in which various playing cards, dice, and chips were 
much in evidence. In another issue the same paper gives 
a German reading from Shakspere in which it censures the 
Prince in much the same manner that Falstaff censured the 
wild Harry of Henry IV. The London cartoonists all had 
their slings with varying good nature. Fun represented the 
Prince as the Prodigal Son being forgiven by the paternal 
British nation. Point to this cartoon was given by the fact 
that the pantomime " L'Enfant Prodigue " was being played 
at the time in the Prince of Wales' Theater. The Pall Mall 
Budget showed the Queen and the Heir Apparent enjoying a 
quiet evening over the card table at home. The Prince is 
saying: " Ah, well ! I must give up baccarat and take to crib- 
bage with mamma." 

Moonshine, in a cartoon entitled " Aren't they Rather 




CHRISTIANITY AND THE BIBLE IN CHINA. 

An exact copy of a Chinese native cartoon. Reproduced in the San Francisco '" Wasp >," Jan. 5, iSq2. 



296 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Overdoing it? " took a kindlier and a more charitable view 
of the whole affair. His Royal Highness is explaining the 
matter to a most horrible looking British Pharisee. " Don't 
be too hard on me, Mr. Stiggins," he says. " I am not such 
a bad sort of a fellow, on the whole. You mustn't believe 
all that you read in the papers." The nature of the American 



K<C '; 



*n 




JAPAN — "DOES IT HURT UP THERE?" 

From " Kiadderadatsch" 

caricature of the scandal may be understood from the cartoon 
which we reproduce from Puck. This cartoon speaks for 
itself. 

The Emperor William and his chancellors inspired La 
Silhouette, of Paris, to a very felicitous cartoon entitled 
" William Bluebeard." William is warning Hohenlohe and 




BUSINESS AT THIS DEATH-BED — UNCLE SAM AS UNDERTAKER. 

From " Kladderadatsch " {Berlin). 




THE START FOR THE CHTNA CUP. 
From "Moonshine" (London). 



298 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



pointing to a closet in which are hanging the bodies of Bis- 
marck and Caprivi, robed in feminine apparel. " My first 
two wives are dead," says Bluebeard. " Take care, 
Hohenlohe, lest the same fate overtake you! " 

The increase in European armament in 1892 suggested to 
Tenniel the idea of the cartoon " The Road to Ruin," which 
appeared November 5 of that year. It shows the figures 
of two armed horsemen, France and Germany, each bur- 
dened with armies of four million men, riding along " The 
Road to Ruin." Their steeds, weighed down by the burdens 




TABLEAU. 

End of the Chinese-Japanese War. 
From Toronto " Grip." 

they bear, are faltering in their strides. A cartoon published 
shortly afterwards in the London Fun shows the figure of 
Peace welcoming the emperors of Germany and Austria, and 
urging them hospitably to lay aside their sword-belts. 
" Thanks, Madam," rejoins Kaiser Wilhelm, " but we would 
rather retain them — in your behalf! " 

The brief war between China and Japan was necessarily 
of a nature to suggest cartoons of infinite variety. It was 
the quick, aggressive bantam against a huge but unwieldy 
opponent, and one of the earliest cartoons in Punch utilized 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



299 



this idea in " The Corean Cock Fight." The big and clumsy 
Shanghai is warily watching his diminutive foe, while the 
Russian bear, contentedly squatting in the background, is 
saying softly to himself: " Hi ! whichever wins, I see my way 
to a dinner." Every feature of Chinese life offered some- 
thing to the caricaturists. For instance, in a cartoon entitled 
" The First Installment," London Fun shows the Jap slashing 
off the Chinaman's pigtail. Now this idea of the pigtail in one 
form or another was carried through to the end of the war. 
For example the Berlin Ulk offers a simple solution of the 
whole controversy in a picture entitled " How the Northern 
Alexander Might Cut the Corean Knot." China and Japan, 
with their pigtails hopelessly tangled in a knot labeled 
" Corea," are tugging desperately in opposite directions, 
while Russia, knife in one hand and scissors in the other, is 
preparing to cut off both pigtails close to the heads of his two 
victims. 

Punch characteristically represented the contending nations 




THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT. 

From the San Francisco " Wasp." 



30o 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




THE GREAT REPUBLICAN CIRCUS. 

This is considered by Mr. Opper as one of his most effective political 

cartoons. 

as two boys engaged in a street fight, while the various 
powers of Europe are looking on. John Chinaman has ob- 
viously had very much the worst of the fray; his features are 
battered; he is on the ground, and bawling lustily, " Boo- 
hoo ! he hurtee me welly much ! No peacey man come stoppy 
him ! " The end of the war was commemorated by Toronto 



302 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Grip in a tableau showing a huge Chinaman on his knees, 
while a little Jap is standing on top of the Chinaman's head 
toying with the defeated man's pigtail. Kladderadatsch, of 
Berlin, printed a very amusing and characteristic cartoon 
when the war was at an end: " Business at the death-bed — 
Uncle Sam as Undertaker." This pictorial skit alludes to 
the proposition from the United States that China pay her 




Mr. Gladstone in the Valley. 

war indemnity to Japan in silver. It shows a stricken China- 
man tucked in a ludicrous bed and about to breathe his last. 
Uncle Sam, as an enterprising undertaker, has thrust his way 
in and insists on showing the dying man his handsome new 
style of coffin. 

Still another clever cartoon in which the Kladderadatsch 
summed up the situation at the close of the war shows a map 







THE BOULANGKR EXCITEMENT. 

The Noisy Boy in the European Lodging House. 
From "■Judge.'''' 




TIZENS, SINCE THE DISARMAMENT THIS HAS BEEX MADE INTO A TELESCOPE. FORTUNATELY 
3 NOT A MUZZLE-LOADER, SO THEY HAVE BEEN ABLE TO PUT IN A LENS AT BOTH ENDS." 

A French cartoon aimed at the Peace Conference. 



3o 4 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

ol the eastern hemisphere, distorted into a likeness of a much- 
perturbed lady, the British Isles forming her coiffure, 
Europe her arms and body, and Asia the flowing drapery of 
her skirts. Japan, saw in hand, has just completed the am- 
putation of one of her feet — Formosa — and has the other — 
Corea — half sawn off. " Does it hurt you up there? " he is 
asking, gazing up at the European portion of his victim. 
The same periodical a few months later forcibly called at- 
tention to the fact that while France and Russia were both 
profiting by the outcome of the war, Germany was likely to go 
away empty-handed. It is entitled " The Partition of the 
Earth; an Epilogue to the Chinese Loan." China, 
represented as a fat, overgrown mandarin, squatting com- 
fortably on his throne, serene in the consciousness that his 




financial difficulties are adjusted for the time being, is ex- 
plaining the situation to Prince Hohenlohe, who is waiting, 
basket in hand, for a share of the spoils. On one side Russia 
is bearing off a toy engine and train of cars, labeled " Man- 
churia," and on the other France is contentedly jingling the 
keys to a number of Chinese seaports. " The world has 
been given away," China is saying; " Kwangtung, Kwangsi, 




A GROUP OF MODERN FRENCH CARICATURISTS. 



3 o6 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

and Yunnan are no longer mine. But if you will live in my 
celestial kingdom you need not feel any embarrassment; your 
uselessness has charmed us immensely." 

The Boulanger excitement, which so roused France until 
the bubble was effectually pricked by the lawyer Floquet's 
fencing sword, was satirized by Judge in a cartoon entitled 
" The Noisy Boy in the European Lodging House." The 
scene is a huge dormitory in which the various European 
powers have just settled down in their separate beds for a 
quiet night's rest when Boulanger, with a paper cap on his 
head, comes marching through, loudly beating a drum. In 
an instant all is turmoil. King Humbert of Italy is shown 
in the act of hurling his royal boot at the offending intruder. 
The Czar of Russia has opened his eyes and his features are 
distorted with wrath. Bismarck is shaking his iron fist. 
The Emperor of Austria is getting out of bed, apparently 
with the intention of inflicting dire punishment on the inter- 
rupter of his slumbers. Even the Sultan of Turkey, long 
accustomed to disturbances from all quarters, has joined in 
the popular outcry. The lodgers with one voice are shouting, 
41 Drat that Boy! Why doesn't he let us have some rest? " 

The old allegorical ideal of Christian passing through the 
dangers of the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Bunyan's 
" Pilgrim's Progress," which has been appearing in caricature 
every now and then since Gillray used it against Napoleon, 
was employed by Tenniel in a cartoon of Mr. Gladstone and 
Home Rule published in Punch, April 15, 1893. The old 
warrior, sword in hand, is making his way slowly along the 
narrow and perilous wall of Home Rule. On either side are 
the bogs of disaster, suggestive of his fate in case his foot 
should slip. 

The Panama scandals in France and the ensuing revela- 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



307 



tions of general political trickery suggested one of Sam- 
bourne's best cartoons, that depicting France descending into 
the maelstrom of corruption. This cartoon appeared in the 




THE ANGI.O-FRENCH WAR BAROMETER. 

FASHODA ! ! ! FASHODA ! ! Fashoda ! Fashoda. 
From " Kladderadatsch" {Berlin). 

beginning of 1893. It shows France in the figure of a 
woman going supinely over the rapids, to be hurled into the 
whirlpool below. 

British feeling on the Fashoda affair was summed up by 
Tenniel in two cartoons which appeared in October and 
November, in 1898. The first of these called " Quit — Pro 



3 o8 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

Quo?" was marked by a vindictive bitterness which ap- 
peared rather out of place in the Punch of the last quarter 
of the century. But it must be remembered that for a 
brief time feeling ran very high in both countries over the 
affair. In this cartoon France is represented as an organ- 
grinder who persists in grinding out the obnoxious Fashoda 
tune to the intense annoyance of the British householder. 
The second cartoon represents the Sphinx with the head of 
John Bull. John Bull is grimly winking his left eye, to signify 
that he regards himself very much of a " fixture " in Egypt. 



CHAPTER XXX 

AMERICAN PARTIES AND PLATFORMS 

THE dangerous condition in which the United 
States found itself about the time we began the 
building of our new and greater navy was de- 
picted in Judge by the cartoon entitled, " Rip Van Winkle 
Awakes at Last." It shows a white-bearded, white-haired 
Uncle Sam seated on a rock about which the tide is rapidly 
rising, looking round at the great modern armaments of 
England and France and Germany and Italy, and murmuring, 
as he thinks of his own antiquated wooden ships of war and 
brick forts, " Why, I'm twenty years behind the age." In 
his old hat, with the broken crown, are the feathers of 
Farragut, Perry, Paul Jones, and Lawrence, but these alone 
are not enough, nor will even the " Spirit of '76," which 
hovers over him in the shape of an eagle, quite suffice. He 
has his musket of 1812 and his muzzle-loading gun of 1864, 
but in the background are those huge cannon of European 
foes and above them is the gaunt, grim figure of a helmeted 
Death. A little more and it would have been too late. 
Now there is yet time. Rip Van Winkle awakes at last. 

An interesting variant upon the old type of " Presidential 
Steeplechase " cartoons appeared in Puck during the summer 
of 1892, after the Republican convention at Minneapolis and 
the Democratic convention at Chicago had respectively 
nominated Mr. Harrison and Mr. Cleveland. The cartoon 
is entitled "They're Off!" and is drawn with admirable 
spirit. The scene is a Roman amphitheater, and the two 

309 



3io 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Presidential candidates, in the guise of charioteers, are guid- 
ing their mettlesome steeds in a mad gallop around the arena. 
Mr. Cleveland's horses, " Tariff Reform " and " Economy," 
are running steadily, and seem to be slowly forging to the 
front, while those of Mr. Harrison, " High Protection " and 




RIP VAN WINKLE AWAKES AT LAST. 
By Gillam in "Judge." 

" Force Bill," are not pulling well together, and with ears 
pointed forward, look as though they might at any moment 
become unmanageable. 

In connection with this campaign of 1892, there was no 
cartoon of more interest than that entitled " Where Am I 
At?" which Bernard Gillam drew for Judge, and this in- 






CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



3ii 




THEY RE OFF 

The Presidential race between Harrison and Cleveland in 1S92. 
From " Puck." 

terest lies less in the cartoon itself than in the amusing story 
of its conception and execution. Right up to election day 
not only Gillam,but the entire staff of Judge, were perfectly 
confident of Republican success at the polls. To them the 
election seemed to be a mere formality which had to be gone 
through with, in order that General Harrison might remain 
in the White House for four years more. So a conference 
was held, after which Mr. Gillam began work on the cartoon 
which was to commemorate the Republican victory. The 
idea used was that of a general smash-up, with Mr. Cleve- 
land in the middle of the debacle and the Republican elephant 
marching triumphantly over the ruins. Along these lines a 
double-page cartoon was drawn with an immense variety of 
detail, reproduced, and made ready for the press. Election 
Day came around, and a few hours after the polls had been 
closed it became evident, to the consternation of Mr. Gillam 
and his associates, that instead of the expected Republican 
victory, Mr. Cleveland had swept the country by overwhelm- 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 313 

ing majorities. What was to be done? It was too late to 
prepare another cartoon, so that the plate already made was 
taken from the press, and the cartoonist set to work. To 
the discomfited countenance of Mr. Cleveland Gillam at- 
tached a beard which transformed the face into a likeness to 
that of the defeated Republican candidate. A huge patch 
drawn over one of the eyes of the Republican elephant 
changed its appearance of elation to one of the most woe- 
begone depression. Other slight changes in the legends here 
and there throughout the picture transformed its nature to 
such an extent that only the most practiced eye could detect 
anything that was not wholly spontaneous and genuine. To 
cap it all, in a corner of the picture Gillam drew a likeness of 
himself in the form of a monkey turning an uncomfortable 
somersault. With a knowledge of these facts the reader by 
a close examination of this cartoon, which is reproduced in 
this volume, will undoubtedly detect the lines along which the 
lightning change was made. Nevertheless, it will be im- 
possible for him to deny that the transformation was cleverly 
done. 

Besides being the year of the Presidential campaign, 1892 
was a year when the thoughts of Americans were turned back- 
ward four centuries to the time when Christopher Columbus 
first landed on the shore of the Western Hemisphere. The 
original ships of Columbus's fleet were being brought over 
the water from Spain; the Columbus idea was being exploited 
everywhere in topical song and light opera ; and it would have 
been strange indeed if it had failed to play some part in 
political caricature. Gillam in Judge made use of it in the 
cartoon entitled " The Political Columbus Who Will NOT 
Land in '92." It represents the ship of the Democracy with 
Mr. Cleveland as Columbus gazing anxiously and uneasily 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



3i5 



at the horizon. At the bow of the ship is the lion's head and 
the shield of Britannia, in allusion to Mr. Cleveland's alleged 
pro-English sympathies. The sail upon which the ship is 
relying for its progress is marked " Free Trade " and is a 
woefully patched and weather-beaten bit of canvas. The 
crew of the ship is a strange assortment which suggests all 
sorts of mutiny and piracy. In the front of the vessel and 
close behind the captain are Dana, Croker, Sheehan, and 
Hill. Beyond them we see the figures of Cochran, Carlisle, 




Crisp, Brice, and Mills and Flower. In the far aft are 
Blackburn and Gorman. Evidently crew and captain are 
animated by despair, although the gull, bearing the features 
of Mr. Pulitzer, of the New York World, that is circling 
around the ship, shows that land is not so many miles away. 
" I don't see land," cries Cleveland-Columbus. And the 
despairing crew, pointing to the Free Trade sail, calls back, 
" And you never will with that rotten canvas." 

In contrast with the vindictive and malicious character of 



316 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

the cartoons which heralded Mr. Cleveland's first election, 
there was a marked absence of unpleasant personalities in 
those which belong to the period of his second term. There 
was no disposition, however, to spare him in regard to the 
growing difficulty he had in holding his party together or his 
assumption of what Republicans regarded as an entirely un- 
warranted degree of authority. This autocratic spirit was 
cleverly satirized by a cartoon in Judge, to which allusion 
has already been made. It consists simply of a map of the 
United States so drawn as to form a grotesque likeness of 
the President. He is bending low in an elaborate bow, in 
which mock-humility and glowing self-satisfaction are amus- 
ingly blended, his folded hands forming the Florida penin- 
sula, his coat-tails projecting into lower California. Beneath 
is inscribed the following paraphrase : 

My country, 'tis of ME, 
Sweet land of liberty, 
Of ME I sing! 

Mr. Cleveland's troubles with his party began early in his 
second administration. As early as April we find him de- 
picted by Judge as the " Political Bull in the Democratic 
China-Shop." The bull has already had time to do a vast 
amount of havoc. The plate-glass window, commanding a 
view of the national capitol, is a wreck, and the floor is 
strewn with the remains of delicate cups and platters, amidst 
which may still be recognized fragments of the " Baltimore 
Machine," " Rewards for Workers," " Wishes of the 
Leaders," etc. An elaborate vase, marked " N. Y. Ma- 
chine," and bearing a portrait of Senator Hill, is just top- 
pling over, to add its fragments to the general wreckage. 

The general depression of trade and the much-debated 
issue of tariff reform recur again and again in the caricatures 



3 i8 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

of the second Cleveland administration, especially after the 
Republican landslide of 1893. Thus, in December of that 
year, a significant cartoon in Judge represents the leading 
statesmen of each party engaged in a game of " National 
Football," the two goals being respectively marked " Protec- 
tion " and " Free Trade. 1 ' " Halfback " Hill is saying, 
" Brace up, Cap; we've got the ball," and Captain Grover, 
nursing a black eye, rejoins disconsolately, " That's all very 
well, boys, but they've scored against us, and we've got to 
put up the game of our lives to beat them." In January the 
same periodical published a pessimistic sketch, showing 
Uncle Sam, shivering with cold, and his hands plunged deep 
into his pockets, gloomily watching the mercury in the " In- 
dustrial Thermometer " sinking steadily lower from protec- 
tion and plenty, through idleness, misery, and starvation, to 
the zero point of free trade. " Durn the Democratic 
weather, anyway," says Uncle Sam. A more hopeful view 
of the situation found expression in Puck, in a cartoon entitled 
" Relief at Hand." Labor, in the guise of an Alpine 
traveler, has fallen by the wayside, and lies half buried 
beneath the snows of the " McKinley Tariff." Help, how- 
ever, has come, in the form of a St. Bernard, named " Wil- 
son Tariff Bill," while Cleveland, in the guise of a monk, is 
hastening from the neighboring monastery, drawn in the 
semblance of the national capitol. Still another cartoon 
harping on the need of tariff reform represents McKinley and 
the other leading Republicans as " Ponce de Leon and His 
Followers," gathered around a pool labeled " High Protec- 
tion Doctrine." " They think it is the fountain of political 
youth and strength, but it is only a stagnant pool that is 
almost dried up." Among the many caricatures in which 
Judge supported the opposite side, and heaped ridicule on 



320 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



the Wilson Bill, one of the best shows Uncle Sam retiring 
for the night, and examining with disgust and wrath the 
meager crazy quilt (the Wilson Bill) with which he has been 




THE HARRISON PLATFORM. 
By Keppler in " Puck.'''' 

provided in lieu of blankets. " I'll freeze to death," he is 
grumbling, " and yet some of those idiots call this a protec- 
tive measure." 

Mr. Cleveland's determination to return to the South the 
flags captured in the War of Secession, in the hopes of put- 
ting an end to sectional feeling, brought down upon his head 
the wrath of the more extreme Republican element, a wrath 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 321 

which was reflected strongly, editorially and pictorially, in the 
papers of the day. This suggested to Judge the cartoon en- 
titled " Halt," in which Mr. Cleveland, in the act of handing 
back the captured flags, is restrained by the spirit of Lincoln, 
which says, " Had you fought for those flags you would not 
be so quick to give them away ! " To which Mr. Cleveland 
is made to reply, " Great Scott ! I thought you were dead and 
forgotten long ago. I only meant to please Mr. Solid South. 
They're rubbish, anyhow." This is another cartoon from 
the hand of the prolific Gillam. 

The movement for the annexation of the Hawaiian 
Islands, which occurred in the spring of 1893, an d which 
many Americans were inclined to regard with suspicion and 
disfavor, was commemorated in a great variety of cartoons, 
both in this country and abroad. It was only natural that a 
movement which owed its inception to a Republican ad- 
ministration, should receive the cordial approval and indorse- 
ment of Judge. A cartoon, dated February 18, represents 
Columbia in the guise of an exemplary modern school-mis- 
tress, serenely holding in order her turbulent class of mingled 
Chinese, negroes, Indians, Italian organ-grinders, and Rus- 
sian anarchists, while she gives a cordial welcome to the 
small, half-naked new scholar from the Pacific, who is timidly 
begging to be admitted. Canada, represented as a demure 
little maiden, stands just behind Hawaii, an interested specta- 
tor, apparently more than half inclined to follow his example. 
In much the same spirit was a design that appeared in the 
Wasp, representing Uncle Sam in the character of St. Peter, 
holding the key to America's political paradise. " Poor 
little imp," he is saying to the Hawaiian applicant, " I don't 
see why I should shut you out, when I've let in all the tramps 
of the world already." Another cartoon which appeared in 






322 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 




THE END OF THE CHILIAN AFFAIR. 
From "Judge." 

Judge was entitled, " The Champion Masher of the Uni- 
verse." This represents Hawaii under the form of a dusky 
but comely damsel, being borne off complacently by a 
gorgeously attired Uncle Sam, while his discomfited rivals 
are looking on in chagrin and disgust. These rivals are 
England, under the form of John Bull; France, shown under 
the features of President Sadi Carnot; Germany, the Em- 
peror William; and Italy, King Humbert. This cartoon 
was drawn by Gillam. 

The Toronto Grip saw the matter in quite a different 
aspect. Hawaii, a badly frightened savage, is bound to a 
stake, while Uncle Sam, in the guise of a missionary, is 
whetting the knife of annexation, preparing to give him the 
conp-de- grace, and at the same time waving off John Bull, 
who holds his knife, " Protectorate," with similar intent. 
" Hold up," says Hawaii, " didn't you say it was wrong to 
eat man?" and Uncle Sam rejoins benevolently, "Yes — 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 323 

but — well, circumstances alter cases, and the interests of 

civilization and commerce, you know You keep off, 

John; he's my meat." The suggestion that England was 
merely waiting for a good excuse to step in and take posses- 
sion of Hawaii, while the American administration and 
Congress were trying to reach an understanding, was eagerly 
seized upon by other journals as well as Grip, especially in 
Germany. The Berlin Ulk portrayed Queen Liliuokalani, 
armed with a broom, angrily sweeping Uncle Sam from his 
foothold in Honolulu, while John Bull, firmly established on 
two of the smaller islands, " laughs to his heart's content," 
so the legend runs, " but the Yankee is mad with rage." In 
similar spirit the Kladderadatsch depicts John Bull and Uncle 
Sam as " Two Good Old Friends," trying to " balance their 
interests in the Pacific Ocean." With clasped hands the two 
rivals are see-sawing backwards and forwards, each striving 
to retain a precarious foothold, as they straddle the Pacific 
from Samoa to Hawaii, and each quite oblivious of the dis- 
comfort of the squirming little natives that they are crushing 
under heel. 

The fiasco of Mr. Cleveland's attempt to restore Queen 
Liliuokalani to her throne was hit off in Judge by a cartoon 
portraying him as Don Quixote, physically much the worse 
for wear, as a result of his latest tilt at the Hawaiian wind- 
mill. The knight's spirit, however, is unbroken, and he is 
receiving philosophically the well-meant consolation of 
Sancho Panza Gresham. 

Another cartoon of sterling literary flavor is that represent- 
ing Mr. McKinley as a political Tarn o' Shanter, which 
appeared during the exciting election of 1896. The 
countenance of Tarn in this cartoon shows none of the anxiety 
and mental perturbation of the hero of Burns' poems. You 




< t 



<» $ 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



325 




DON QUIXOTE BRYAN MEETS DISASTER IN HIS ENCOUNTER WITH 
THE FULL DINNER PAIL. 

By Victor Gillam in "Judge." 



can see that he has full confidence in his good mare, " Na- 
tional Credit," and is perfectly convinced that she will carry 
him unscathed over the road to Good Times, Prosperity, and 
Protection. The carlins have been close at his mare's heels, 
however, and as he passes the bridge over which they dare 




OUTING OF THE ANARCHISTS. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



327 



not cross, the foremost of his pursuers has caught and pulled 
away as a trophy the tail of the steed. The tail, however, 
is something with which he can well part, for it typifies four 
years of business depression. The leaders of the pursuing 
carlins are Free Trade, Anarchy, Sectionalism, and Popoc- 
racy. 

Mr. Bryan's appeal to the farmer in 1896 was hit off by 
Hamilton in a powerful, but exceedingly blasphemous, car- 




TO TH-E DEATH. 



toon entitled " The Temptation." Bryan in the form of a 
huge angel of darkness has taken the farmer to the top of a 
high mountain to show him the riches of the world. As far 
as the eye can see stretch oceans and cities and hills and rivers 
and mountains of silver. It is a great pity that so grim and 



328 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



powerful a cartoon should have been marred by that display 
of bad taste which has been too frequent in the history of 
caricature. 

The caricature produced by the campaign between Mr. 
McKinley and Mr. Bryan in 1900 offers few, if any, cartoons 
more admirable than that by Mr. Victor Gillam, representing 




Don Quixote Bryan meeting disaster in his fight against the 
full dinner pail. This cartoon has that literary flavor which 
has been too much lacking in American caricature, and which 
raises this particular cartoon far above the average in the 
same school. The idea, of course, is based on Don Quixote's 
disastrous encounter with the windmill, which that poor crack- 
brained gentleman took to be a giant. The body of the 
windmill is a huge dinner pail and its arms are a crossed knife 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



329 



and fork. Don Quixote, incased in armor from head to 
foot, and mounted on the Democratic donkey with free silver 
for a saddle, has tilted against the solid structure with 
disastrous results. His lance is shattered, and he and his 




" WE ARE THE PEOPLE." 

faithful steed lie prostrate and discomfited on opposite sides 
of the road. The Sancho Panza needed to complete the 
picture appears under the familiar features of Mr. Richard 
Croker, who, leading the Tammany Tiger by a rope, is 
hurrying to his master's assistance. In the distance may be 
seen the White House, but the road in that direction is com- 
pletely barred by the stanch windmill that has so success- 
fully resisted the mad knight's onslaught. 



CHAPTER XXXI 

THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 

THE pent-up feeling throughout the United States, 
which reached a dangerous degree of tension 
during the weeks preceding the declaration of war 
against Spain, was forcibly symbolized in the Minneapolis 
Herald. The dome of the National Capitol is portrayed, 
surmounted by a " Congressional safety-valve." McKinley, 
clinging to the cupola, is anxiously listening to the roar of 
the imprisoned steam, which is escaping in vast " war clouds," 
in spite of all the efforts of Speaker Reed, who is freely 
perspiring in his effort to hold down the valve. 

One of those cartoons which are not to be forgotten in a 
day or a week or a month; one which stirs the blood and 
rouses the mind to a new patriotism even when seen years 
after the events which inspired it, is Victor Gillam's " Be 
Careful ! It's Loaded ! " which appeared a few weeks before 
the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and which we 
deem worthy of being ranked among the twenty-five or thirty 
great cartoons which the nineteenth century has produced. 
To realize to-day its full force and meaning one has to recall 
the peculiar tension under which the American people were 
laboring during the months of February, March, and April, 
1898. The Maine had been destroyed in Havana Harbor, 
and although, now that anger has died down, we can no lon- 
ger cling implacably to the belief, which was then everywhere 
expressed, that it was an act emanating from the Spanish 
Government, at the time it was too much for our over- 

330 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



333 



wrought nerves; the condition of Cuba was growing every 
day more deplorable, and everyone felt that the inevitable 
conflict was hourly at hand. In the picture American 
patriotism is symbolized by a huge cannon. A diminutive 
Spaniard has climbed to the top of a mast of a Spanish vessel 
and monkey-like is shaking his fist down the muzzle. Uncle 
Sam, standing by the gun and realizing the Spaniard's im- 




Speaker Reed to McKinley — " You've got to 
bank the fire some way or other: I can't hold 
in this steam much longer." 

Minneapolis " Tribune." 

minent peril calls out, excitedly, "Be Careful! It's 
Loaded! " a warning to which the latter seems little inclined 
to pay any attention. In its very simplicity this cartoon dif- 
fers greatly from most of those of the school of Puck and 
Judge. There is none of that infinite variety of detail which 
makes an elaborate study necessary in order to arrive at a full 
comprehension of the meaning of a cartoon. " Be careful! 
It's Loaded ! " like the most striking English and French car- 
toons, may be understood at a glance. 



334 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



A cartoon like Grant E. Hamilton's " The Latest War 
Bulletin " we find amusing at the present time. We did not 




THE LATEST WAR BULLETIN. 

By Hamilton in "Judge." 



find it so a little over five years ago. This latest war bulletin, 
printed in asbestos, is supposed to have been just received 
from the infernal regions. His Satanic majesty, with a sar- 
donic grin upon his face, has just composed it to his own 
entire satisfaction. Marked up on the burning furnace of 
Hades it reads: "Only Spanish will be spoken here until 
further notice — P. S. Guests will please leave their crowns 
and Spanish 4's in charge of the night clerk." 

Another equally hideous cartoon by Hamilton is that 
entitled " The Spanish Brute Adds Mutilation to Murder." 
It shows a hideous ape-like monster representing Spain, one 
blood-dripping hand smearing the tombstones erected to the 
sailors of the Maine and the other clutching a reeking knife. 
All about him under the tropical trees are the bodies of his 







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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



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mutilated victims. The expression of the monster's coun- 
tenance is a lesson in national prejudice. It shows how far a 
well-balanced nation may go in moments of bitterness and 
anger. 

One of the most striking and amusing of all the cartoons 
evoked by the results of the Spanish-American War ap- 
peared in Punch at a time when our departure from our 




THE SPANISH BRUTE— ADDS MUTILATION TO MURDER. 
By Hamilton in "Judge." 

traditional policy began to cause comment in Europe. There 
are two figures, that of Dame Europa and that of Uncie Sam. 
Dame Europa is a lady of frigid aspect, with arms folded, 
and who has drawn herself up to full height as she gazes 
scornfully at the complacent and unruffled Uncle Sam. " To 
whom do I owe the honor of this intrusion? " she asks icily. 
" Marm, my name is Uncle Sam." " Any relation of the 
late Colonel Monroe?" is the scathing retort. 



338 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

No less interesting than the American cartoons of the 
Spanish War are those contributed by Spain herself, although 
in the light of subsequent events they are chiefly amusing for 
their overweening confidence and braggadocio insolence. 
Among the more extravagant flights of Spanish imagination, 
which later news turned into absurdities, may be cited 
" Dewey's Situation," in which the victor of Manila is 
represented as a disconsolate rat, caught in the Philippine 
mouse-trap; " Cervera bottles up Schley," a situation which 
the sober facts of history afterwards reversed; and " McKin- 
ley's Condition," in which the President is represented as 
swathed in bandages, and suffering severely from apocryphal 
injuries received at Porto Rico and Cienfuegos. All of 
these cartoons appeared at different times in the Madrid 
Don Quijcte, which did not always keep on this level of 
empty boasting, but occasionally produced some really clever 
caricature. A regular feature of the Spanish War cartoons 
was the American Hog as a symbol of theUnited States, and 
some of the applications of this idea in the Don Ouijote 
were distinctly amusing. For instance, in reference to Spain's 
accusation that an American ship flew the Spanish flag at 
Guantanamo in order to approach near enough to cut the 
cable, America is shown as a fat hog, triumphantly strutting 
along on its hind legs and ostentatiously waving the Spanish 
colors. Again, the Sampson-Schley controversy is hit off in 
a picture showing Sampson surrounded by a number of naval 
" hogs," each armed with gigantic shears and bent upon 
obtaining the Admiral's scalp. Still another cartoon seeks 
to explain the " real purpose " in getting Cuba away from 
Spain. A drove of pigs have clustered around a huge barrel 
of Cuban molasses and are eagerly sucking the contents 
through tubes. Of a more dignified type are the caricatures 




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CENTURY IN CARICATURE 341 

representing Spain as a beautiful and haughty Seriorita, 
boldly showing how she keeps beneath her garter " a knife 
for the American pigs " ; or pointing to her shoe on which 
Cuba serves as a buckle, and arrogantly challenging a 
diminutive McKinley, — " you can't unbuckle that shoe! " 



CHAPTER XXXII 



THE BOER WAR AND THE DREYFUS CASE 



A 



CARTOON which was a forerunner of the Trans- 
vaal War and the railway between Capetown and 
Cairo was that entitled " The Rhodes Colossus," 



which appeared in Punch December 10, 1892. It was by the 
hand of Linley Sambourne. It shows a colossal figure of Cecil 




...l.i V.- 



THE RHODES COLOSSUS 

STHIDINC FROM CAfE TOWN TO CAlF. 



By Linley Sambourne. 

Rhodes standing on a map of Africa with one foot planted in 
Egypt and the other at the Cape. In his hands he holds a 
line suggesting the telegraph wire connecting the two places. 

342 




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344 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Although the German Government refused to interfere in 
the protracted struggle in the Transvaal, the sympathy of 
Germany with the Boers found expression in a host of car- 
toons, bitterly inveighing against British aggression. 
Thoroughly characteristic is one which appeared in the 
Lustige Blatter entitled "English World-Kingdom; or, 
Bloody Cartography." A grossly distorted caricature of 




THE ENGLISH WORLD KINGDOM, OR BLOODY ' 
CARTOGRAPHY. 
From the " Lustige Blatter." 

Victoria is standing before a map of the world, and dipping 
her pen in a cup of blood, held for her by an army officer. 
Chamberlain, at her elbow, is explaining that " the lowest 
corner down yonder, must be painted red!" Another of 
the Lustige Blatter' 's grim cartoons, alluding to the terrible 
price in human life that England paid for her ultimate vic- 
tory in the Transvaal, depicts Britannia, as Lady Macbeth, 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 345 

vainly trying to wash the stain from her bloody hands. 
" Out, damned spot! " In lighter vein is the cartoon which 
is here reproduced from the Wiener Humoristische Blatter 
showing " Oom Paul at His Favorite Sport." Kruger, 




BRITANNIA AS LADY MACBETH TRYING TO WASH 
AWAY THE STAINS OF THE BOER WAR. 

From the " Lustige Blatter." 

rakishly arrayed in tennis garb, is extracting infinite enjoy- 
ment from the congenial exercise of volleying English 
soldiers, dressed up as shuttlecocks, over the " Transvaal 
net " into the watery ditch beyond. 

Judged by the manner it was mirrored in the caricature of 
Europe and America, the Dreyfus Case assumed the magni- 
tude of a great war or a crisis in national existence. During 
the last two or three years that the degraded Captain of 
Artillery was a prisoner at Devil's Island, when Zola was 
furiously accusing, and the General Staff was talking about 




THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. 
Minneapolis "Journal." 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



347 




OOM PAUL S FAVORITE PASTIME. 

From the " Wiener Humoristische Blatter.'' 



" the Honor of the Army," and France was divided into two 
angry camps, one had only to glance at the current cartoons 
to realize that Dreyfus was, as the late G. W. Steevens called 
him, " the most famous man in the world." For a time the 
great personages of the earth were relegated to the back- 
ground. The monarchs and statesmen of Europe were of 
interest and importance only so far as their careers affected 
that of the formerly obscure Jewish officer. 

Perhaps the most famous of all the admirable cartoons 
dealing with I' Affaire was the " Design for a New French 
Bastile," which was of German origin and which caused the 
paper publishing it to be excluded from French territory. It 
appeared just after Colonel Henry had cut his throat with a 
razor in his cell in the Fortress of Vincennes, when suspicions 
of collusion were openly expressed, and some went so far as 
to hint that the prisoner's death might be a case of murder 
and not suicide. The " Design for a New French Bastile " 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



349 



showed a formidable fortress on the lines of the famous 
prison destroyed in the French Revolution with a row of the 
special cells beneath. In one of these cells a loaded revolver 
was placed conspicuously on the chair; in the next was seen a 
sharpened razor; from a stout bar in a third cell dangled a 
convenient noose. The inference was obvious, and the fact 
that the cells were labeled " for Picquart," " for Zola," 




MR. RHODES— THE NAPOLEON OF SOUTH AFRICA. 
From the Westminster " Budget" {London). 

" for Labori " and the other defenders of Dreyfus gave the 
cartoon an added and sinister significance. In caricature the 
Dreyfus case was a battle between a small number of Anti- 
Dreyfussard artists on the one hand, and the Dreyfus press 
with all the cartoonists of Europe and the United States as 
its allies on the other. The opportunity to exalt the prisoner, 
to hold him up as a martyr, to interpret pictorially the spirit 



350 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



of Zola's ringing " la verite est en marche, et rien ne I'arre- 
tera! " offered a vast field for dramatic caricature. On the 
other hand the cartoon against Dreyfus and his defenders was 




FIRE 
Froi7i " Psst " (Paris 



essentially negative, and the wonder is that the rout of the 
minority was not greater — it should have been a veritable 
" sauve qui pent." 

The spirit of anti-Dreyfussard caricature was Anti- 
Semitism. One of the most striking of the cartoons on this 




THE LAST PHASE OF THE DREYFUS CASE. 

Justice takes Dreyfus into her car. 

From " Amste?-dammer." 

side purported to contrast France before 1789 and France at 
the end of the Nineteenth Century. In the first picture we 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



35i 




. f 1 mr 

TOWARD FREEDOM. 

Madame la Republique—" Welcome, M. Le Cap- 
itaine. Let me hope that I may soon return you your 
sword." , , 

From " Punch " (.London) 

were shown a peasant toiling laboriously along a furrow in 
the ground, bearing on his shoulders a beribboned and be- 
plumed aristocrat of the old regime, whose thighs grip the 
neck of the man below with the tenacity of the Old Man of 
the Sea. That was France before the Revolution came with 
its bloody lesson. In the picture showing France at the end 
of the Nineteenth Century there was the same peasant toiling 
along at the bottom, but the burden under which he tottered 
was fivefold. Above him was the petty merchant, who in 
turn carried on his shoulders the lawyer, and so on until rid- 
ing along, arrogantly and ostentatiously, at the top was the 
figure of the foreign-born Jew, secure through the posses- 
sion of his tainted millions. 



352 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



The dangerous straits through which the Waldeck- Rous- 
seau ministry was obliged to pass were hit off in a cartoon 
appearing in the Humor is tische Blatter of Berlin, entitled 
" Between Scylla and Charybdis." On one side of the nar- 
row waterway a treacherous rock shows the yawning jaws of 
the Army. On the other side, equally hideous and threaten- 
ing, gleam the sharpened teeth of the face typifying the 



r 







A DUTCH VIEW. 

The present condition of the French general staff. 

From " Amstef-dammer.' 1 '' 

Dreyfus Party. Waldeck-Rousseau, appreciating the choppi- 
ness of the sea and the dangerous rocks, calls to his gallant 
crew: " Forward, dear friends, look neither to the right nor 
to the left, and we will win through at last." Many of the 
cartoons dealing with the Dreyfus case were mainly symbolic 
in their nature; full of figures of " Justice with her Scales," 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



353 



" Justice Blindfolded and with Unsheathed Sword," 
" Swords of Damocles " and so on. A Dutch cartoon in 
Amsterdammer, entitled " The Last Phase of the Dreyfus 
Case," showed Justice taking the unfortunate captain into her 
car. The horses drawing the car were led by Scheurer- 
Kestner and Zola, while following the chariot, to which they 
are linked by ignominious chains, were the discredited Chiefs 
of the Army. The same paper humorously summed up the con- 




BETWEEN SCYI.LA AND CHARYBDIS. 

Waldeck-Rousseau— " Forward, dear friends, 
look neither to the right nor the left, and we will 
win through at last." 

From " Hamoristische Blatter " (Berlhi). 

dition of the French General Staff in a picture showing a fall- 
ing house of which the occupants, pulling at cross-purposes, 
were accelerating the downfall. The decision upon Revision 
and the dispatching of the Spax to Cayenne to bring Dreyfus 
back to France was commemorated in London Punch in a 
dignified cartoon called " Toward Freedom." Madame la 
Republique greeted Dreyfus: "Welcome, M. le Capitaine. 



354 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



Let me hope I may soon return you your sword." The same 
phase of the case was more maliciously interpreted by 
Lustige Blatter of Berlin in a cartoon entitled " At Devil's 
Island," which showed the Master of the Island studying 
grinningly a number of officers whom he held in the hollow 
of his hand, and saying: " They take away one captain from 
me: but look here, a whole handful of generals! Oh, after 
all, the arrangement is not so bad." 




AT DEVIL'S ISLAND. 

The Master of the Island.— "They take away one captain 
from me; but look here, a whole handful of generals! Oh, after 
all, the arrangement is not so bad." 

From " Lustige Blatter " {Berlin'). 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE MEN OF TO-DAY 

WITH the Spanish-American War, the Affaire 
Dreyfus in France, and England's long strug- 
gle for supremacy in the Transvaal, the period 
arbitrarily chosen as the scope of this book comes to a bril- 
liant and dramatic close. But the cartoonist's work is never 
done. Nimble pencils are still busy, as in the days of Row- 
landson and Gillray, in recording and in influencing the trend 
of history. And although, now and again during the past 
century, there has been some individual cartoonist whose 
work has stood out more boldly and prominently than the 
work of any one of our contemporaries in Europe or in this 
country stands out to-day, there has never been a time in the 
whole history of comic art when Caricature has held such 
sway and maintained such dignity, and has enlisted in her 
service so many workers of the first talent and rank. With- 
out alluding to the men of France and England, what an 
array it is that contemporary American caricature presents ! 
C. G. Bush of the New York World, Charles Nelan of the 
New York Herald, Frederick Burr Opper and Homer 
Davenport of the New York American and Journal, 
Mahoney of the Washington Star, Bradley of the Chicago 
Evening News, May of the Detroit Journal, " Bart " of the 
Minneapolis Journal, Mayfield of the New Orleans Times- 
Democrat, Victor Gillam, carrying on the traditions of his 
brother — Rogers, Walker, Hedrick, Bowman, McCutcheon, 
Lambdin, Wallace, Leipziger, Berryman, Holme, Barthole- 

355 




C. G. BUSH OF "THE WORLD." THE DEAN OF ACTIVE AMERICAN CARTOONISTS. 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 



357 



mew, Carter, Steele, Powers, Barritt — and to name these men 
does not nearly exhaust the list of those artists whose clever 
work has amused and unconsciously influenced hundreds of 
thousands of thinking American men and women. 

There are interest and significance in the fact that a majority 
of the ablest caricaturists of to-day are devoting their talents 
almost exclusively to the daily press. It is an exacting sort of 
work, exhaustive both physically and mentally. The mere 

WILLIE AND HIS PAPA. 




-What on earth ar: you doing in there. Willie?" 
■Teddy put me in. He saya it's the be3t place for i 



idea of producing a single daily cartoon, week in and week 
out, — thirty cartoons a month, three hundred and sixty-five 
cartoons a year, with the regularity of a machine, — is m itself 
appalling. And yet a steadily growing number of artists are 
turning to this class of work, and one reason for this is that 
they realize that through the medium of the daily press their 
influence is more far-reaching than it possibly can be in the 



358 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

pages of the comic weeklies, and that at the same time the 
exigencies of journalism allow more scope for individuality 
than do the carefully planned cartoons of papers like Puck 
or Judge. Speed and originality are the two prime requisites 
of the successful newspaper cartoon of to-day, a maximum of 
thought expressed in a minimum of lines, apposite, clear- 
cut, and incisive, like a well-written editorial. Indeed, our 
leading cartoonists regard their art as simply another and 
especially telling medium for giving expression to editorial 
opinion. Mr. Bush, " the dean of American caricaturists," 
may be said to have spoken for them all when he said, in a 
recent interview, that he looks upon a cartoon as an editorial 
pure and simple. 

" To be a success it should point a moral. Exaggeration 
and a keen sense of humor are only adjuncts of the cartoonist, 
for he must deal with real people. He must also be a student. 
I am obliged not only to use my pencil, but to study hard, 
and read everything I can lay my hands on. The features 
of Roosevelt, Bryan, Hanna, and Croker may be familiar to 
me, but I must know T what these men are doing. I must 
also know what the masses behind these popular characters 
think and believe." 

Another direct result of the influence of journalism upon 
caricature, in addition to that of compelling the artist to 
keep in closer touch than ever before with contemporary 
history, is the growing popularity of the series method — a 
method which dates back to the Macaire of Philipon and the 
Mayeux of Travies, and which consists in portraying day by 
day the same more or less grotesque types, ever undergoing 
some new and absurd adventure. It is a method which suits 
the needs of artist and public alike. To the former, his 
growing familiarity with every line and detail of the features 




HOMER DAVENPORT, OF THE " NEW YORK AMERICAN AND JOURNAL. 



360 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

and forms of his pictorial puppets minimizes his daily task, 
while the public, even that part of the public which is opposed 
to comic art in general, or is out of sympathy with the polit- 
ical attitude of a certain series in particular, finds itself gradu- 
ally becoming familiar with the series, through fugitive and 
unexpected glimpses, and ends by following the series with 
amusement and interest and a growing curiosity as to what 
new and absurd complications the artist will next intro- 
duce. This employment of the series idea is as successful 
in social as political satire. Mr. Outcault's " Yel- 
low Kid " and " Buster Brown," Mr. Opper's " Happy 
Hooligan " and " Alphonse and Gaston," Gene Carr's 
" Lady Bountiful," and Carl Schultze's " Foxy Grandpa " 
are types that have won friends throughout the breadth of 
the continent. In the domain of strictly political caricature, 
however, there is no series that has attracted more attention 
than Homer Davenport's familiar conception of the Trusts, 
symbolized as a bulky, overgrown, uncouth figure, a primor- 
dial giant from the Stone Age. And since there have been a 
number of apocryphal stories regarding the source of Mr. 
Davenport's inspiration, it will not be without interest to 
print the artist's own statement. " As a matter of fact," he 
says, " I got the idea in St. Mark's Square in Venice. Seeing 
a flock of pigeons flying about in that neighborhood I imme- 
diately, with my love of birds and beasts, determined by fair 
means or foul to purloin a pair. I watched them fly hither 
and thither, and in following them came across a statue of 
Samson throwing some man or other — I forget his name — to 
the ground. The abnormal size of the muscles of the figure 
struck me at once, and turning round to my wife, who was 
with me, I said with a sudden inspired thought, ' The 
Trusts!'" 




DAVENPORT'S CONCEPTION OF THE TRUSTS. 



362 CENTURY IN CARICATURE 

Of equal importance are the various series in lighter vein 
through which Mr. Opper aims to lead people to the same 
way of thinking politically as the paper which he serves. 
Long years of labor and constant production do not seem to 
have in any way drained his power of invention, for no sooner 
has one series done its work, and before the public has be- 
come sated with it, than an entirely new line of cartoons is 
introduced. Mr. Opper, as well as Mr. Davenport, has had 
his fling at and drawn his figure of the Trusts, and to place 
the two figures side by side is to contrast the methods and 
work of the men. Mr. Opper's purpose seems to be, first of 
all, to excite your mirth, and consequently he never fails to 
produce a certain effect. When you take up one of his car- 
toons in which the various stout, sturdy, and well-fed gentle- 
men typifying the different Trusts are engaged in some pleas- 
ant game the object of which is the robbing, or abusing of 
the pitiable, dwarfish figure representative of the Common 
People, your first impulse is a desire to laugh at the ludicrous 
contrast. It is only afterwards that you begin to think se- 
riously how badly the abject little victim is being treated, and 
what a claim he has upon your sympathy and indignation. 
In those series which are designed entirely along party lines, 
such as " Willie and his Papa," this method is even more 
effective, since it begins by disarming party opposition. 

Of such men, and the younger draughtsmen of to-day, 
much more might be written with sympathetic understanding 
and enthusiasm. But most of them belong rather to the 
century that has just begun rather than that which has lately 
closed, and a hundred years from now, whoever attempts to 
do for the twentieth century a service analogous to that 
which has here been undertaken for the nineteenth, will find 
an infinitely ampler and richer store of material, thanks to 



CENTURY IN CARICATURE 363 

this group of younger satirists in the full flood of their en- 
thusiasm, who are valiantly carrying on the traditions of the 
men of the past — of Leech and Tenniel, of Daumier, and 
Philipon, and Cham and Andre Gill, of Nast and Keppler 
and Gillam, and who have already begun to record with 
trenchant pencil the events that are ushering in the dawn of 
the new century. 



THE END 



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